From the reign of Edward I, St. George was prescribed for all levels of the English army, both knights and foot-soldiers. By establishing the Order of the Garter, Edward III made the veneration of St. George an activity that he shared with the nobility and knighthood of England. In the reign of his successor Richard II, St. George came to represent the “good” memory of the “Edwardian settlement,” which had been based on consultation with the nobility and joint prosecution of war in France, and was used as a rebuke to Richard's novel idea of “regality,” expressed partly through his own veneration of St. Edward the Confessor. Thereafter, what may be called the political community consistently recognized St. George as the patron saint of the kingdom. Kings would venerate St. George in order to prove their worthiness to rule England, while other people might invoke the saint in order to curry favor with the king, or to rebuke him for not ruling well.

A necessary question to ask, though, is how many people in the kingdom of England this situation actually describes. The army that Henry V mustered for the invasion of France in 1415 numbered some 10,000 men, and the political community (king, bishops, nobility, substantial knights, and greater gentry) numbered perhaps 2% of the English population. In other words, most English people were members neither of the military nor of the political community. Is it even possible, therefore, to speak of St. George as a “national patron”? It is true that the army was a sort of national institution – that is, English people might take pride in its successes even when they were not there to participate in them (they were certainly taxed to pay for them), and the political community by definition was influential beyond its numbers. However, can we truly speak of St. George as a national patron, when (potentially) so few people actually recognized him as such?

St. George certainly was popular throughout the kingdom of England. The traditional expressions of a saint's cult, such as church or guild dedications, artwork, or hagiography, all attest to this popularity.