St. George , patron saint of England is celebrated on 23rd April. He seems a strange choice for English folk being of Syrian origin and born of a Greek father and a Syrian mother. He was a Roman soldier and was martyred for his Christianity in 303 AD at a time in the Roman world when Christians were being viciously persecuted. It was much later,  in the medieval period, that he became a much loved  figure of romance, rescuing princesses  and fighting dragons, an  archetypal  Arthurian chivalric knight in fact.

He featured as one of Jacobus de Voragine’s most popular   Golden Legends, compiled around 1260 AD  and a ”best seller” second only to the Bible as printed  by Caxton in 1483. As for the dragons , it was the great Argentinean writer Jorge Louis Borges who noted that most cultures created stories about dragons and  monsters for their heroes to slay…