Happy St George's Day

It always perplexes people from abroad that the patron saint of England was not English - whatever that is with our mixed bag of heritage which includes Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Africans, Normans, Celts, Gaels, Asians, Romans, Scandinavian Vikings to name but a few - but Cappodacian, from Asia Minor; in the area that is now Turkey. On this stitched map of the early 1800s you can see some of the devotion to the patron saint in the naming of St George's Channel which separates us from Ireland. More interesting is the naming of what is now the North Sea which separates us from mainland Europe as The British Ocean, whereas on many maps of this period it is called The German Ocean.