Flag of England

How to read it

The Flag Institute, a UK charity for the study of flags, calls St George’s cross the national flag of England, one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and lists its adoption route as traditional and its designer as unknown. It gives the proportions as 3:5 and the red as Pantone 186. The earliest record of the cross in English use is from 1277. The naval historian W. G. Perrin, in British Flags (1922), found payments in the accounts for Edward I’s Welsh war of that year for 340 pennoncels, small lance flags, “of the arms of St George” for the king’s foot soldiers, and concluded that Edward I made the cross an English national symbol. Perrin found no solid ground for the common belief that Richard I brought it back from the crusades: in 1188 the English crusaders took white crosses and the French red ones. A plain cross is one of heraldry’s ordinaries, and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica says “Silver a cross gules”, a red cross on silver (white), was given early to St George, patron of knights and of England, as his arms.

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Why is England’s flag different from the UK’s?

Because England’s flag is one part of the UK’s. The Union Flag lays St George’s red cross over the white diagonal cross of St Andrew for Scotland and the red diagonal cross of St Patrick for Ireland, on royal blue. The UK government says the first Union Flag, in 1606, combined the flags of England and Scotland, and the present one dates from 1801. In the Flag Institute’s specification the red cross keeps a narrow white border, 2 units wide on a cross 6 units wide. Wales has no cross in the Union Flag.

Flying it on churches

The Church of England says a church flying the flag of St George must put the arms of its diocese in the top corner nearest the mast, as defined by an Earl Marshal’s warrant of 1938, and that there are no set days for flying a flag from a church. The Flag Institute’s guidance for churches reads the same warrant more loosely. It says the warrant was issued at the request of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, that there are no legal restrictions on which flags a church flies, and that churches also have an ancient tradition of flying a plain St George’s cross, since the diocesan flag is expensive to make and its arms are hard to make out at a distance.

On government buildings and at football

UK government guidance says buildings with one flagpole should fly the Union Flag every day, except on occasions when they may fly other flags, the national flags of the constituent nations among them. St George’s Day, 23 April, is on the government’s list of flag days for England.

Tom Gibbons of Teesside University wrote in 2010 that since the Euro 1996 tournament English fans have increasingly used St George’s cross rather than the Union Flag for the national team. His survey of fans found the link between the cross and feelings of Englishness less straightforward than it appears: some fans put local, regional, British or European identity on a par with English.