St George's Day is April 23, next Saturday.
But next Saturday is Holy
Saturday, a day of suspense between Good Friday and the great feast of
Easter.
So the Church of England has moved the saint's day to Monday May 2,
as has the Catholic Church in England.
The trouble is that most people are
taking no notice.
It has happened before.
In 1943, April 23 was Good Friday, and, with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, St George's Day was transferred to May 3. But it didn't seem the same.
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has this year urged the Government to "hold celebrations and put up flags on buildings on May 2", reports The Church Times.
If anything, the Archbishop's continuing campaign to mark the day of the patron of England with a bank holiday has been too successful. It is seen not as a holy day but as a holiday.
The EnjoyEngland website, run by the body that by rights should be the English Tourist Board, but which calls itself Visit England, is in no doubt that this year too "April 23 is the day of our patron saint, St George".
It recommends "the largest St George's Day Festival" in the country, at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, which runs from Holy Saturday to Easter Monday.
"Encounter a dragon in the medieval zone," urges the website, "and cheer on your favourite knight."
Every man, woman and child in Britain must know that St George killed the dragon and probably that he rescued a maiden too.
King Edward VI asked about this legend more coldly when the Knights of the Garter were gathered at Greenwich on April 23, 1550.
"My Lords, I pray you what saint is St George that we here so honour him?"
For as a Puritan he held only with saints named in the Bible.
By then the damage had been done.
From the fourth century, St George had been honoured as a martyr, but his martyr's triumph had been overlaid with the appealing legend of the dragon. Worse, Edmund Spenser had turned him into an allegorical figure in his long, complicated poem The Faerie Queene.
Thus the ground was prepared for Edward Gibbon.
Gibbon, quite dishonestly, dismissed the cult of St George as a case of mistaken identity.
George he averred was a heretical Patriarch of Alexandria torn apart by the angry mob in the reign of Julian the Apostate.
His only source was an unsupported assertion in the musings of a dead French scholar.
Never mind.
If at the beginning of the 18th century St George was best known as an inn sign, he was brought back to favour as a national hero by the advent of the Hanoverians.
On his church of St George, Bloomsbury, Hawksmoor set a statue of George I atop a stepped steeple based on the classical mausoleum of Halicarnassus, with the Lion and Unicorn at the base for good measure.
St George, as the ideal of Christian England, was consolidated in the reign of Queen Victoria (who found a gold rose on her dinner table each April 23).
His appeal later waned by reaction against the patriotic fervour surrounding him during the two wars.
Both Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral had dedicated to St George their chapels commemorating those who died in the Great War.
When the George Medal for civilian bravery was inaugurated in 1940, the royal warrant stipulated that it should bear on one side the image of "St George slaying the dragon on the coast of England".
The pendulum swung again in his favour, and, as a boy's name, George has grown in popularity until, two years ago, it has become the 12th most popular in England (80th in Scotland).
English people are no longer frightened to celebrate St George's Day patriotically, which means doing no work but drinking more than usual.
This, they feel, should not be the prerogative of the BNP.
But not many will think to honour their patron in church on May 2, even though it is a bank holiday.