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Flag waving

TheCatWoman

It seems that the English flag is being used again as a symbol of nationalism, being paraded around the streets by those wanting rid of asylum seekers and placed in gardens.

Do you feel comfortable with it? I don't, for me it's tainted by Neo Nazi's and other fascists, or for football.

In Britain we've never had a habit of flag use and worship like some other countries, mostly seen in America and I wouldn't like us to acquire the habit. 

Am I the only one to find it ironic that St George was a Turk? He supplanted St Edmund as Englands national saint on a whim of Richard the Lionheart, we have lots of native saints to choose from, St Alban, St Edward, St Thomas A'Becket, St Hilda, and so many more often more obscure ones like St Petroc or St Willibrord.

I also feel uncomfortable that as a non Christian the flag is a blatently Christian religious symbol, at least in Wales we have Ye Ddraig Goch, The Red Dragon, nice and mythological and non religious.

Parents

  • i agree with you so much as my village has now grown a forest of flags whereas before now, it would just be for special occasions. Richard The Lionheart was not an English speaker. It all seems so jumbled up when it comes to defining what pride in our flag should mean? Nothing to do with poor politics of blaming minorities.

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  • i agree with you so much as my village has now grown a forest of flags whereas before now, it would just be for special occasions. Richard The Lionheart was not an English speaker. It all seems so jumbled up when it comes to defining what pride in our flag should mean? Nothing to do with poor politics of blaming minorities.

Children
  • in reply to LucyLandRover

    The ability of Richard I to speak English is not known. He was born in England, probably Oxford, and he is first recorded as leaving England when he was about eight years old. So it is highly likely that he was exposed to spoken English in his childhood. We know that his father, Henry II, could understand English, though he was not a fluent speaker. Richard wrote poetry in French and Occitan and knew Latin, so he was a polyglot. I did once come across a record of him swearing at a captive, perhaps Isaac of Cyprus, in English, but have not been able to locate it again.

    By the 1150s most Norman aristocrats in England knew English. Many of the first generation married English wives, when they inherited land through such a marriage. Strangely, the first generation of Normans born in England abandoned the shaved neck and faces of their fathers' generation and adopted the long hair and facial hair of the Anglo-Saxons.