Saint George

c275 - c303 (28)

Thought to have been a Palestinian who was a senior officer in the Roman army of  Roman Emperor Diocletian (c236 - 284 - 305 - c316 (80)), who was responsible for the last great Christian persecution before Constantine's Edict of Milan (313) made Christians the flavour of the month.  George secretly converted to Christianity and had his head chopped off in Lydda, Palestine, after he outed himself. 

His memory was rediscovered when there was a need for military models in and after crusading times (c1100 - c1300), and he slipped into the role of Patron Saint of England (replacing England's only sainted King - Edward, who was neither knight nor dragon killer - see below) after King Edward III, who wanted more knighthood,  had formed the Order of the Garter in 1350 and associated George's name with it as Patron. 

A seemingly strange choice for England, especially as they share him with freemasons, scouts, the US Armoured Brigade, the Greek Army, Portugal, Aragon & Catalonia, Georgia, Moscow, Beirut, and numerous other places and causes including the UNESCO World Books and Copyright day (what?).  A utility rather than special saint - George also has a slot in Islam.

Link to paintings of Saint George (and the Dragon)

Link to Wikipedia page.

Saint Colomba

c523 - 597 (74)

Irish monastic promoter "The Dove of the Church" who left Ireland for the remote Island of Iona full of remorse after causing a very bloody war over an intellectual property dispute.  He developed Iona into a major centre of monasticism and learning.  Coincidentally he died in the same year that Augustine got going in Canterbury.  Amongst many other places, his name was adopted by the Cistercian Abbey of Chiaravalle della Colomba in Lombardy, after his spirit (as a dove) assisted in the relocation of the abbey buildings.

Saint Oswald (King Oswald)

c605 - 642 (37)

Northern English King, convert, martyr, whose skull ended up packaged with Cuthbert's remains by the time the latter got to his shrine in Durham.

Saint Aidan

?? - 651

An Irish monk from Saint Colomba's monastery on the Island of Iona, Aidan established a monastery on the Island of Lindisfarne at the invitation of King Oswald in 635.  Lindisfarne is a low lying island on the north-eastern seaboard of England near the Scottish border.

Saint Hilda

614 -680 (66)

Abbess of Whitby when the famous Synod of Whitby took place in 664.  This addressed various conflicts (including the date of Easter) between the Celtic church (which had come with people like Saint Aidan from never Romanized Ireland to convert northern England), and the Roman church (which had filtered north after the conversion successes of the Romanized Augustine in Canterbury).  Differences were mostly resolved in favour of the Roman church's viewpoint, as a result of which many of the "Irish school tradition" monks at places like Lindisfarne went home.

Over a thousand years later, the ships Endeavour, Resolution, Adventure and Discovery were built at Whitby, and manned by men of the town when they undertook three epic voyages of discovery under the command of Captain James Cook in the 1770s.  Amongst other things, these resulted in the "discovery" of Australia.

Saint Etheldreda

c630 - 679 (49)

Queen and heroine of the Norfolk Broads whose shrine was in Ely Cathedral.

Saint Cuthbert

c635 - 687 (52)

The ultimate Northumbrian (and indeed English) holy man who started life as a Scot in Melrose (in a predecessor of the later great Cistercian Abbey of Melrose) and later became Bishop of Lindisfarne, based at the priory on the island founded by Aidan.  Happiest as a recluse, his stature and management skills rarely allowed this.  His shrine (reduced to tomb slab post Henry VIII) in Durham Cathedral was for a few hundred years pre Becket the richest and  most visited shrine in England.

Venerable Bede (aka Saint Bede the Venerable)

c673 - 735 (62)

Historian monk based at Jarrow, who wrote "The Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples" which did for the lasting memory of  early English / Celtic saints what Giorgio Vasari was later to do for Renaissance artists.  The only English Doctor of the Church, and the only Englishman to rate a mention in Dante's Paradiso (alongside Saint Isidore of Seville).  His tomb, reduced from a much grander affair pre-Henry VIII, is in the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral.

Ethelbert II - Saint and King of the East Angles

? - 794

Ethelbert may already have been King of the East Angles for some time when he made what proved to be a fateful journey west to seek the hand of Aelfryth, daughter of the powerful King Offa of Mercia.   For some reason Offa had him killed instead, and he was buried in Hereford - probably somewhere in what is now Hereford Cathedral.  His life had been accompanied by "supernatural events" and his shrine attracted a brisk pilgrim trade for many years.   In the early 1300s Hereford, which had for a long time possessed one of the many Limoge made Becket (d1170) reliquary chasses, invented its very own Saint Thomas in the form of Bishop Thomas Cantilupe (d1282), and his shrine (whose tomb, most unusually, is still there), took over from Ethelbert's as a pilgrim honeypot, though today's Cathedral remains half dedicated to the sainted King.   

Offa, King of Mercia

? - 757 - 796

During his reign the most powerful of the Anglo Saxon Kings, Offa is mainly remembered today because of "Offa's Dyke" - a long defensive trench he built to keep out the Welsh.   He produced some fine coins (including a copy of an Abbasid Dinar) and also persuaded the Pope to set up a new Archdiocese based on Lichfield which covered all the Midlands and East Anglia.

King Offa in the gallery of Mercian, Norman and Plantagenet Kings gracing the west facade of Lichfield Cathedral - presumably holding the mitre of the new Archbishop of Lichfield he had created.

By 800, the numerous tribes of Angles and Saxons who had moved into England from mainland Europe after Roman Britain collapsed, had consolidated into the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex and Kent.

VIKINGS

790s

First Viking attacks on Northumbria.  The Vikings were to end up destroying most of the church and civic infrastructure of England and Ireland that was within striking distance of the coast like Lindisfarne and Whitby. 

King Alfred (The Great)

 849-871-899 (50)

The only English King known as "the Great"

Danelaw

886

The Treaty of Alfred and (Viking) Guthrum formalized a boundary between Anglo Saxon jurisdictions and the areas in the North East (including East Anglia) where Danish law and kings ruled.

King Athelstan

895 - 925 - 939

Brought Northumbria into the sort of united English Kingdom and thus became the first "King of Britain", although it took the arrival of the Normans in 1066 to consolidate everything on a lasting basis.  Athelstan's tomb is in Malmesbury Abbey. 

Tomb of King Athelstan in Malmesbury Abbey

Saint Edward

(King Edward the Confessor)

c1004-1042-1066 (62)

The only Sainted English King, and Patron Saint of England until (oddly) he was usurped by the foreigner Roman / Palestinian Saint George.  His shrine, reduced to a tomb, is in Westminster Abbey.

Saint Thomas (Becket)

Link to boxed bits of Becket

Link to images of Becket's life and murder

1118 - 29/12/1170 (52)

Lord Chancellor of Plantagenet Henry II's England, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, who was famously murdered (beheaded and brained) in his cathedral by four knights plus retainers on 29 December 1170. 

Becket was not a popular, saintly or even particularly nice person, but the manner of his death fired up huge public interest, and within two years he had become a Euro Celebrity and was canonised.  Graphic representations of his killing appeared in places as far away as Sicily (Mosaic in Monreale Cathedral), Spoleto (Umbria - fresco in the church of Saints John and Paul) and the pilgrimage churches of France such as Chartres (an entire window sponsored by the Guild of Tanners dedicated to Becket's life), as well as many English churches.  His tomb and shrine in Canterbury Cathedral and the dozens of Limoge Chasses containing Becket "relics" gave new meaning to the commercial possibilities of pilgrimage and medieval celebritydom. 

Before his fateful return to England, Becket had been put up for three years by the monks of the Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny, in Burgundy and whilst there had dumped on Henry big time from the pulpit of the Abbaye Ste-Madeleine in nearby Vézelay.