What nationality was St.George, the patron saint of England?
“Saint George” – The Pork Salesman who became England’s Patron Saint The ‘real’ George was a rather different character from the paragon of Christian fiction. As Gibbon and others made clear, ‘St. George’ was a legendary accretion around a notorious 4th century bishop, George of Cappadocia. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia concedes that it is ‘not improbable that the apocryphal Acts have borrowed some incidents from the story of the Arian bishop.’ The future archbishop of Alexandria began his career as a humble cloth worker in Cilicia (now southern Turkey). By ‘assiduous flattery’ or other means he acquired the contract to supply the Roman army with bacon. Says Gibbon: “His employment was mean; he rendered it infamous. He accumulated wealth by the basest arts of fraud and corruption; but his malversations were so notorious, that George was compelled to escape from the pursuits of justice.” Making his way to Palestine, George set himself up in the religion business at Diospolis (Lydda), w
