The heart of this engaging book is its central section covering the period 1272–1509, its crux being the author’s discussion of the use and meaning of the royal banner of St. George, the potent red cross on a white ground, as an emblem of the English realm as commonwealth, though that is not a term the author uses. “It is clear … that by the late 1380s, the banner … ‘the king’s banner,’ represented the crown as an institution, something that the ‘king’s party’ could not simply claim for itself” (74). Good has been describing the events of 1387, when the Lords Appellant, barons appealing for good government by Richard II, put the king under restraint and defeated the Earl of Oxford’s attempted rescue. The earl was “condemned to death partly for ‘accroaching to himself royal power [by causing] the king’s banner to be displayed in his company, contrary to the dignity of the King and his Crown’” (75). The incident was recalled in the deposition of Richard in 1399: he had incited men “to rise up against the … lords and magnates of the kingdom and servants of the republic, [by raising] his standard against the peace which he had sworn publicly to keep” (75).

Good recalls that six years earlier the banner of St. George had been raised on Blackheath by the peasant leaders of the Great Revolt (75). Good takes this is as an expression of loyalty. He thinks it unlikely that it symbolized “the commons’ collective identity against the king, implying that he had betrayed the real England,” “a truly national symbol” that had been “prescribed for them in war and that they were now free to use independently of the king’s command” (75). Here is the dilemma that makes Good’s book a valuable contribution to debates around the emergence and nature of the English state. Was George’s survival of the Reformation as patron of the English realm, explicitly recognized as such in an order of Henry VII in 1487 (90) and in Lydgate and Caxton’s fifteenth-century Lives of St. George (114, 115), the result of royal and aristocratic promotion or of adoption of a national symbol by a people on the long march to representative democracy within a constitutional monarchy?

The absence of an unequivocal conclusion is partly due to Good’s inquiry falling between two stools. His book’s title heralds a study of medieval matters, but the last chapter concerns the saint’s “post-medieval career.” In fact, no discussion of George in relation to the growth of English identity can ignore postmedieval developments, and thirty-odd pages are not sufficient. It might have been better to excise the final chapter or expand it and rebrand the product. As the reviewer’s introduction demonstrates, it is in the fourteenth century that Good is at his strongest and the issues most exciting, and so the first option would still have left us a fine work. However, it is national identity that the author is interested in, and to skate over the early modern period fails to engage with some crucial questions. For example, did the medieval “Ridings of St George,” popular street theater, transform themselves into the widespread mummers’ plays of St. George that Good consigns to a single paragraph (137)? A much richer treatment of the Ridings continues to be that of Samantha Riches in her St George, Hero, Martyr and Myth (Stroud, 2000) (a sumptuously illustrated book in comparison to the generally faded black-and-white images here). Riches also remains the stronger guide through the dark regions of dragons—and on the matter of chastity. A frustrating aspect of Good’s study is that it leaves the reader wanting to know more about George’s role as “Our Lady’s Knight.” “Hackneyed epithet” that it was (Good, 47, quoting R. L. Greene, ed., A Selection of English Carols [Oxford, 1962], 227), it goes to the heart of medieval devotion, given the ubiquity of Mary’s veneration. Was Riches correct in concentrating on sexuality? Notably, she identified a number of George’s dragons as female. Good doesn’t go there, which is a pity since masculinity appears predominant in George as martial embodiment of national pride. A further frustration is that Good does not make more of continental comparisons (e.g., George as patron of Catalunya and Georgia) or explore the literature around the use of nationalistic symbols in European societies generally.

Finally, it is a pity that Good’s survey of dedications honoring George (97–101 and appendix) relied mainly on nineteenth-century lists and did not benefit from the most recent research in the field, that of the reviewer and his colleagues in TASC, the project for a Transnational Dataset and Atlas of Saints’ Cults, whose thirty thousand records have been in the public domain since around 2000 (Graham Jones, ed., Saints of Europe [Donington, 2005] and Graham Jones, Saints in the Landscape [Stroud, 2007]). This matters because of the cases of dedicatory confusion between George and Gregory the Great, called “the apostle of the English” by Bede and pater ad populus anglorum at the Council of Clovesho, 747, and still revered as such in the eleventh century (Paul Hayward, “Gregory the Great as ‘Apostle of the English’ in Post-conquest Canterbury,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55, no. 1 [January 2004]: 19–57). George was the pope’s baptismal name, Gregory his name in religion. The growth of national identity was accompanied by a shift of devotion from apostolic to national saints via royal patrons like Denis in France and Edward the Confessor in England. One sheds light on the other. Hopefully the “father of the English people” will have a place in a second edition of this generally excellent volume.