Culture and History - St Andrew's Cross

Scotland's Patron Saint has been the subject of much malarkey over the millennia. First off, there's the X shape of the St.Andrew's cross, the very basis of Scotland's national flag.

The story goes that St.Andrew, or just plain Andy the Apostle as he was then known, was about to be crucified in the conventional, upright style, but protested that he was simply not worthy to die in the same way as Jesus. Somehow he persuaded his executioners to change the shape of the cross into the X shape, known as the saltire.

Cool concept, but highly unlikely. All of the earliest depictions of the event show a traditional cross, and it is only after the Middle Ages that the popular myth takes hold in painters' imaginations.

Moving swiftly on, the white cross against a blue background.

After an extended raid into "foreign" territory, Fergus Mac Angus (Big Fergie), King of the Picts, is fleeing from a Northumbrian army led by a very pissed off Saxon warlord by the name of Athelstane. It's 832 AD. 5 AM. East Lothian Time.

Athelstane has every right to be upset. The buggers have burned his crops, robbed his homes and rustled his cattle. Simply not cricket.

Fergie is sleeping fitfully. He's worried shitless. He's cornered and outnumbered. Suddenly, St.Andrew, the very chap, top Saint, appears before him in a dream and promises victory will be his.

Fergie wakes and emerges bleary eyed into the pre-dawn. There, before his very eyes and above his troops, is a white X shaped cloud formation, silhouetted against a clear but still dark blue sky. The cross of St.Andrew.

The combined Pictish and Dalriadan (Scottish) forces, inspired by this divine vision, win the day against the heathen hordes, eventually trapping and slaughtering the escaping Saxons en-masse in a bloody bottlekneck that was the only crossing of the River Peffer, and which subsequently became known as Athelstane's Ford, or Athelstaneford, as it is now.

It's a wonderful story, but it does beg the question of why St.Andrew and his cross were not formally recognised as symbols of Scotland until around the year 1000, some 170 years later. Indeed, the first flags featuring the St.Andrew's Cross do not appear until after the 15th century.

Saint Andrew - Not worthy of the usual slow agonising death

Martyred at Patras in Greece in 60AD, St.Andrew's association with Scotland began in the 8th century with a shipwreck off Kinrymont, on the coast of Fife.

A monk, later to become St.Rule, was on board, and brought ashore with him a selection of holy relics from Patras including, allegedly, an arm bone, knee cap, tooth and three fingers belonging to St.Andrew.

In the medieval world, such remains were highly precious and desirable items, with Andrew a particularly prized star in the Saintly stakes, so what the folk of Patras thought about Rule's blatant bit of grave-robbing, goodness only knows.

St.Rule built a church on the spot where he laid the bones to rest, and the settlement he founded became known thereafter as St.Andrews.

That much is undoubtedly true.

The credibility problem here, however, lies with dem bones. Quite simply, if every church around the world that claims to have a piece of St.Andrew were to get together and assemble his collected remains, St.Andrew would probably be proved to be a remarkable man of 12 legs, 9 hands, 300 teeth and more ribs than a wooly mammoth.

Ah well. It's a supply and demand thing. Just not enough Saint to go round. Probably due to the fact that St.Andrew, when he's not busy fulfilling his duties in Scotland, is also the Patron Saint of both Russia and Greece.

His Feast day is the 30th November, and although ostensibly a religious festival, the celebrations that are observed throughout Scotland in St.Andrew's name nowadays on that date have precious little, FirstFoot can assure you, to do with religion.