St George's Chapel Windsor in the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

THE foundation in 1348 of the College of St George, whose canons would serve the royal chapel in Windsor Castle, provided a spiritual home for the simultaneously instituted Order of the Garter, and this fine collection opens with three essays focused on the Order. Juliet Vale examines Edward III's early chivalric enthusiasms, the hastiludes and court festivities of the 1330s and 40s and the pageantry of crests, devices and Arthurian heraldry displayed at them, which nursed ideas and associations that were later to be brought together in the institution of the Order. Mark Ormrod, while acknowledging the significance of these earlier developments, argues that the plans which gave the Order its distinctive constitution and linked it institutionally with the Chapel of St George only really took shape after Edward's homecoming from the siege of Calais. Their realisation established Windsor Castle, the King's birthplace, as the new centre of the cult of English royalty, and of its chivalrous tradition that looked back to Arthur. Exclusivity and knightly distinction were the hallmarks of the companionship of the new Order, the justice of the King's martial cause the message of its famous motto, honi soit qui mal y pense, which the courtly fancy later romanticised with the story of the King picking up the garter dropped by a lady. The significance of the re-dedication of the Windsor Castle chapel to St George, Edward's choice of patron saint for his Order, is penetratingly examined by David Morgan. Edward thereby made a competitive bid for a first call for England on the favour of the saint who in the age of crusading had come to be revered in the west as the supreme exemplar of Christian chivalry. Edward's invocation of this ‘athlete of Christ’ as the ‘special patron’ of the English illustrates at once the internationalism of his chivalrous aspirations and the spiritual dimension to the nationalism that his wars fostered.