GEORGE, SAINT, a saint, venerated both in the eastern and western churches, held in especial veneration as the patron of chivalry, and adopted as the tutelary saint of England. His origin is extremely obscure, and the very oldest accounts of him which are extant, contain a strange admixture of history and legend. He is honored both in the east and the west as a martyr, and the Greek acts of his martyrdom fix the date of his death as the persecution under Diocletian; but these acts are, by the confession even of Roman Catholic hagiologists, undoubtedly spurious. On the other hand, it is asserted (see Gibbons's Decline and Fall, ii. 323) that the canonization of George is one of the many errors which Protestant historians freely impute to the Roman calendar, and that the who is thus reputed a saint and martyr is no other than the turbulent and unscrupulous Arian partisan, George of Cappadocia, whom his Arian followers revered as a saint, and imposed as such upon the credulity of their Catholic countrymen. It must be confessed, however, that the best modern authorities, Catholic and Protestant, agree in admitting the great improbability of this allegation. Heylin is of one mind in this matter with the Jesuit Papebroch, and Dean Milman adopts the arguments and agrees in the opinion of the Roman Catholic bishop Milner. The truth is, that whatever is to be said of the early accounts- of the martyrdom of George, the fact of his being honored as a martyr by the Catholic church, of churches being dedicated to him, and of the Hellespont being called " St. George's arm," is traced by Papebroch, by .Milner, and by other writers to so early a date, and brought 'so immediately into contact with the times of the angry conflicts in which George of Cappadocia figured as an Arian leader, that it would be just as reasonable to believe that the Catholics of England at the present day would accept lord George Gordon as a Catholic saint, as to suppose that the Catholics of the East—while the tomb of Athanasias was hardly closed upon his honored relics—would accept as a sainted martyr his cruel and unscrupulous persecutor.
Indeed it cannot be doubted that the St. George of the eastern church is a real person age, and of an earlier date than George of Cappadocia—very probably of the date to which these vets, though otherwise false, assign him. The legend of his conflict with the dragon arose most probably out of a symbolical or allegorical representation of his contest with the pagan persecutor. As in this ancient legend St. George appears as a soldier, he was early regarded as one of the patrons of the military profession. Under this title, he was honored in France as early as the 6th c.; but it was not until after the crusaders, who ascribed their success at the siege of Antioch to his intercession, returned to Europe from the holy war, that the religious honor paid to him reached its full development. He was selected as the patron saint of the republic of Genoa and also of England. At the council of Oxford, in 1222, his feast was ordered to be kept as a national festival. In 1330, he was made the patron of the order of the garter by Edward III.; and even since the reformation, the ancient sentiment is still popularly maintained.