St George’s Day was first officially recognised as a holiday (holy day) at the Synod of Oxford in 1222; but the various divines who gathered for the meeting at Osney Abbey that year would probably be amazed that of all their weighty deliberations, that particular resolution is the one best remembered nearly 800 years on.

The assembled prelates, led by the Papal legate Archbishop Langton, were far more concerned about such matters as forbidding clergymen from keeping concubines in their homes or, sadly, railing against Jews than about St George. Indeed, a plaque near the only remaining gatehouse of Osney Abbey records that someone called Robert of Reading was actually executed near that spot on April 17, 1222, for adopting Judaism and having a Jewish girlfriend.

St George himself was probably an early Christian martyr born in Asia Minor.

He became a distinguished Roman soldier but blotted his copybook as far as the Emperor Diocletian was concerned by refusing to renounce his faith — a refusal which led to torture and ultimately beheading on April 23, 303.

The dragon-slaying story grew up in the the 12th and 13th centuries.

Legend even has it that St George visited England as a Roman soldier and killed the poor old dragon on Dragon Hill, just below the White Horse carved into the chalk downs above the village of Uffington; there is even a fresco of him in the nearby 13th- century church of St Nicholas in Baulking, uncovered in the 1980s, and complete with damsel in distress.

As a soldier saint, who had famously appeared in the sky before the Christian crusaders at the siege of Antioch in 1098, his cult was unstoppable.

The crusader king Richard Lionheart (born in Beaumont Palace, Oxford, in 1157) adopted him along with the crusader insignia of a red cross on a white background; and after the Synod of Oxford St George ousted St Edward the Confessor (born in Islip in 1003) for the job of England’s patron saint. No contest.

His cult received a further boost when Edward III founded England’s highest order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, in the 1340s, the time he instigated his claim to the French throne, with George as the patron saint.

Then artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, including Edward Burne-Jones, whose painting of St George hangs in the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, took up his cause with a vengeance.

Even closer to our own time the allegory of George as representing good destroying evil, became a theme of war memorials throughout the country following the First World War — although I gather from an excellent new book by Kate Tiller, reader emerita in English local history at Oxford University, that only 2.2 per cent of UK war memorials are sculptural.

I am sure the new book, Remembrance and Community: War Memorials and Local History (published by the British Association for Local History at £6.95) will be of huge help to anyone wanting to explore how such memorials came to be built in their own particular towns and villages — and the stories behind the names of the men commemorated.

In this context, one of the most moving of memorials may be found in the church of St John the Baptist at the village of Great Rissington, just across the county boundary in Gloucestershire. It records the deaths of 13 inhabitants of the village during the Great War — including five brothers from the Souls family, Britain’s worst case of loss to a single family.

The memorial includes faded photographs of the five brothers, members of a farm labouring family of six sons and three daughters. Their mother received a letter of condolence from PM Herbert Asquith (who had a house at Sutton Courtenay) and whose own son, Raymond, was also killed.

As for St George, one of the best bronze war memorials of him that I know may be found not far away, at Stanway.