A river of northeast Quebec, Canada, rising on the Quebec-Labrador border and flowing about 563 km (350 mi) northward to Ungava Bay.

 

George (d. c.303), martyr, patron of England. He suffered at Lydda (= Diospolis) in Palestine, where his tomb was shown. It is likely but not certain that he was a soldier. The cult was both ancient and widespread, with feasts in the East, where he was called ‘megalomartyros’, and in the West, where he occurs in the Martyrology of Jerome and the Gregorian Sacramentary. Churches were dedicated to him in Jerusalem and Antioch in the 6th century and from early times he was invoked as patron of the Byzantine armies. Numerous ikons of him portrayed him as a powerful helper against evil powers affecting individual lives. The record and the cult of George considerably precede the Acts which survive in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Turkish.

The famous story of George and the Dragon is by no means primitive, but became immensely popular in the West through the Golden Legend, translated and printed by Caxton. The dragon, a local pest which terrorized the whole country, poisoned with its breath all who approached it. Every day it was appeased with an offering of two sheep, but when these grew scarce, a human victim, chosen by lot, was to be substituted instead. The lot had fallen on the king's daughter, who went to her fate dressed as a bride. But George attacked the dragon, pierced it with his lance, and led it captive with the princess's girdle, as if it were completely tame. George told the people not to be afraid: if they would believe in Jesus Christ and be baptized, he would rid them of this monster. The king and people agreed; George killed the dragon and 15, 000 men were baptized. George would take no reward, but asked the king to maintain churches, honour priests, and show compassion to the poor. The Legend continued with an account of the sufferings and death of George in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian, this last point being probably the only historical element in the story.

George has been known in England since the 7th–8th centuries, evidenced by the Martyrology of Bede, and the OE Martyrology and several early calendars. He is also recorded in the Irish Martyrology of Oengus. Ælfric also repeated the Legend.

The cult of George took on new dimensions for England during the Crusades. A vision of SS. George and Demetrius at the siege of Antioch preceded the defeat of the Saracens and the fall of the town on the first Crusade. The author of the Gesta Francorum claimed that George's body was in a church near Ramleh. Richard I placed himself and his army under George's protection. By now he was the special patron of soldiers. At the Synod of Oxford (1222) his feast was made a lesser holiday. Edward III (1327–77) founded under his patronage the Order of the Garter, for which the fine chapel of St. George at Windsor was built by Edward IV and Henry VII. Meanwhile, in 1415 archbishop Chichele had George's feast raised in rank to that of one of the principal feasts of the year: this was after the battle of Agincourt, when Henry V's famous speech invoked St. George as England's patron. But even then, Edward the Confessor and Edmund of East Anglia were not entirely displaced. The cult of George reached its apogee in the later Middle Ages: by then not only England, but Venice, Genoa, Portugal, and Catalonia regarded him as their patron: for all he was the personification of the ideals of Christian chivalry. He was numbered in Germany among the Fourteen Holy Helpers while Russia and Ethiopia also venerated him. With the invention of gunpowder and the consequent diminution of the importance of sword and lance his popularity faded, a process largely completed by the Reformation. In England, however, he retained his popularity: the most complete surviving cycle of his Legend (with even more fantastic elements) survives in the early 16th-century glass at St. Neot's Cornwall, while Spenser declared:

Thou, among those saints which thou doest see,
Shalt be a saint, and thine own nation's friend
And patron; thou Saint George shalt called be,
St. George of merry England, the sign of victory.

Elsewhere Renaissance artists of many countries had painted or sculptured his image, the most famous being Uccello's painting in the National Gallery, London, and Raphael's in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. There are also notable cycles of murals at the cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand and the chapel of San Giorgio at Padua. Dedications were frequent; there are famous churches of St. George at Rome, Constantinople, Venice, and Verona; in England over 160 ancient churches and not a few modern ones are dedicated to him. His patronage extends to soldiers, knights, archers, armourers, and through a pun on the Greek form of his name, to husbandmen. He was also invoked against the plague, leprosy, and syphilis. It is one of the more unexpected destinies of Palestinian soldier-saints that George, of whom so little is known, should be regarded as the symbol of English nationalism and prowess in war. The name of St. George's Channel applied to the Irish Sea is due to a very late form of the Legend which made him travel to England by sea, approaching it from the West. Feast: 23 April; but his cult was reduced to a local one in the reform of the Roman calendar in 1969; 18 April in the Coptic Church.

Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.

• AA.SS Apr. III (1675), 100–63 with C.M.H., pp. 205, 209; H. Delehaye, Les Légendes grecques des saints militaires (1909), pp. 45–76; on the versions of the Legend see K. Krumbacher, ‘Der heilige Georg,’ Abhandhungen der K. bayerischen Akademie, xxv (no. 3), 1911 and E. A. W. Budge, St. George of Lydda (1930) for the Ethiopic version and E. W. Brooks in Museon, xxxviii (1925), 67–115 for the Syrian. See also F. Cumont, ‘La plus ancienne Légende de saint Georges’, Revue d'Histoire des Religions, cxiv (1936), 5–51 and for popular accounts G. J. Marcus, Saint George of England (1939); I. H. Elder, George of Lydda (1949). See also Bibl. SS., vi. 512–21

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George Eastman	george foreman
George Washington	curious george