Crumbs from the Table

Saint George, the patron saint of England, was an historical figure, although many things ascribed to him are not historical.  George of Lydda was born into a noble family in an area called Cappadocia (now Turkey), which at the time was populated by Greek speaking citizens of the Roman Empire. George was born around 280. His mother appears to have come from Diospolis/Lydda (now known as Lod, near Tel Aviv), the place where he was later to die. When his father died, George and his mother moved back to the town of her birth.  George was a soldier in the Roman army at the time of Emperor Diocletian. When the protracted persecution of Christians unleashed by Diocletian began to be directed at Christians in the army, George was martryred by decapitation at Lydda in the year 303.  George's death was said to have inspired Empress Alexandra of Rome (d. 314) to become Christian.  The later stories of dragon-slaying are not historical and do not appear in early hagiographies (biographies of

 When you look through old photos of Bury, the town where I live in Greater Manchester, a recurring scene is the "Whit Walks". The pictures show crowds of people, young and old, processing with banners. In Bury, a muster point for these walks was the old Union Square which was demolished to make way in the late 1960s for what later became the Millgate shopping centre.  The origin of the Whit Walks was the Sunday school movement, which was started in 1781 by Robert Raikes in Gloucester. The first Sunday school in Manchester dates to 1784. The Whit Walks commemorate the anniversary of this movement, which provided basic education on a Sunday for children who were forced to work the other six days of the week. Dr Elmer Towns who wrote an early Raikes biography says “the early Sunday School basically aimed at teaching reading and writing with the Bible as a text book”. Many if not all churches locally ran a Sunday school teaching dozens of children every week; even our little chu