Article

Belief

Creed

Monsters

26 September 2024

5 min read

Which dragon does St Michael need to slay today?

Explore the cultural impact of the dragon killer.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

A patch depicting a angel in armour, wielding a sword, on camoflague uniform.

Thomas Tucker on Unsplash.

St Michael is everywhere. But only if you have eyes to see him. He’s probably somewhere in your town. He may even be hiding in your wardrobe in one of your jumpers. Retailer Marks and Spencer trademarked the ‘St Michael’ brand in 1928. It was inspired by their best-selling hosiery brand – St Margaret. The name Michael came from the founder of M& S, Michael Marks. But the logo they used, a winged angel holding aloft a sword, was a reference to the archangel St Michael mentioned in the Bible.

Even in the pages of that book, however, St Michael is a little elusive, being named only a handful of times. Perhaps that was his mystique. Less is more. But whatever St Michael was doing worked really well in the Middle Ages. A tradition arose around him, culminating in a feast day known as Michaelmas on 29th September. This feast day had extra significance as it become a ‘Quarter Day’.

In days gone by, the year was divided into four, bookended by quarter days. Michaelmas was one, at least in England. The next is Christmas Day, followed by Lady Day (March 25), and Midsummer (June 24). Rents were traditionally due on quarters days. Legal and financial contracts were to be settled. Michaelmas was particularly associated with the domestic servants moving around. You will hear it referred to Michaelmas along those lines in Chapter One of Pride and Prejudice.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades.

Many schools called their autumn term ‘Michaelmas’. Mine did, although no-one ever explained what it meant. As schools began to dominate British life, the calendar year ceased to be broken into four but three. Now our lives are regulated by school holidays, ‘back to school’ days and half term, when it is traditional to double the cost of your holiday rental. Christmas remains. Lady Day morphed into the end of the tax year. (I’m sure the Virgin Mary would be thrilled). And Midsummer Day has vanished almost completely.

St Michael had a good run. He had been a wildly popular figure from Anglo-Saxon times and Michaelmas a firm fixture in the calendar. Many churches founded in that period were named after him. Over 800 of those churches dedicated to St Michael remain in England, scattered across the counties. (I walked around one on Sunday afternoon in East Coker, Somerset where the ashes of TS Eliot have been interred.) Only the Virgin Mary, St Peter and All Saints are more popular in the church dedication charts.

In short, St Michael was a big deal. Why? Because he was a dragon killer.

In fact, Michael was not just ‘a killer of dragons’ but ‘the killer of the dragon’. That dragon is the silver-tongued serpent, Satan himself. The final reference to Michael in the Bible reads thus – and yes, it sounds better in the King James Version:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

St Michael is the defeater of evil itself. This is a comforting figure when boatloads of Vikings could appear in your shire at any minute in order to destroy, steal, rape and pillage. The fact that these longboats had a dragonhead on the prow served only to reinforce this image that the enemy were representatives of Satan himself.

Dragon-slaying was a staple of heroic tales. Beowulf naturally fights a dragon. Merlin is mixed up with a dragon called Kilgharrah. There are also dozens of accounts in which dragons are slain, often presented in a prosaic and serious way, like a report of pest control. Not far from me in the woods near Wells, the Bishop Jocelyn killed a dragon in 1320s. The latest account like this is in 1614 , reporting a “strange and monstrous serpent” living in St Leonard’s Forest near Horsham in Sussex “to the great annoyance and diverse slaughters both of men and cattle, by his strong and violent poison”.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades. Dragons are everywhere. Our TV screens are constantly invaded by insatiable fire-breathing serpents. Bookshops bulge with titles about dragons.

When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping off their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts.

Has the time come for St Michael to return? Surprisingly not.

St Michael has not been summoned because he is a dragon killer, and we don’t want to kill dragons. Not anymore. We want to tame them. We want to understand them. We want to harness their power.

That’s what happens in Game of Thrones. Daenerys Targaryen wishes to assert her claim to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros using the dragons that she has hatched. But can she use those dragons to bring about justice or ‘the greater good’ without being consumed by them or becoming dragon-like herself? It is an eternal question, played out in the Cold War with nuclear weapons and in Middle Earth with a powerful ring.

We are seduced by the allure of the dragon all too easily. It’s there at the very beginning of Western Culture in the Bible: Eve is approached by a persuasive snake who tempts her to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She falls for it. But throughout the Bible, the one blamed for the sin is not Eve, but Adam.

But how is it Adam’s fault? Adam failed to give the serpent the Archangel Michael treatment. Adam should have killed the serpent or chased it out of the garden. He didn’t because, well, things were just starting to get interesting. And the rest is theology.

St Michael is the extinguisher of evil. But we don’t want to destroy evil. We just want to see it diminished. A bit. In fact, the talk of Good and Evil is rather embarrassing. We don’t do Good and Evil. We do ‘values’. We don’t condemn sins. We seek to re-educate those with ‘anti-social behaviours’.

We have the dubious luxury of speaking this way because we aren’t about to be attacked by Vikings any times soon. When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping of their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts. Evil is very real. That’s when you might need some clean pairs of Marks and Spencer’s famously excellent underwear.

Scroll the news and you will find that millions around the world live with the reality of Viking-like terror right now. For them the virtues of St Michael might be more apparent.

Article

Creed

Identity

Nationalism

30 October 2025

5 min read

Flags on lampposts are a cry from long-neglected communities

As banners fly, they whisper of pride and pain

Philip North

Philip is the Bishop of Blackburn

A St George's Cross flag flutters on a tower.

St Helen's Church, Welton, Yorkshire.

Different Resonance on Unsplash.

A flag meant to symbolise unity within a nation. Yet over the summer, flags in the UK became less a source of togetherness and more a flashpoint for division.

In towns and cities across the nation, flags of St George and Union Flags have appeared on bridges, on lamp posts and on buildings. The motivations of those hoisting the flags are often unclear, but the way in which different sets of people perceive these flags carries an alarming message about the widening gulf that now exists within our nation.

For one set of people, the flags are sinister and carry a deep sense of threat. For many people of global majority heritage, the flags bear an intimidating message that those with racist motives are claiming the nation 'back' from them, leaving them stateless and with nowhere to belong. Meanwhile for those on the centre or left of the political spectrum, the flags feel like a straightforward claim to power by the far right and a sign of the growing popularity of their policies and rhetoric. The Church of England has mostly placed itself on this side of the divide and many church leaders have spoken of the flag flying phenomenon with anxiety and distaste.

But there is another narrative at play. As the flags continue to flutter in the autumn breeze, something which is a symbol of fear for one set of people is for another a welcome sign of hope.

This was powerfully brought home to me during a meeting with a leading Orthodox rabbi following the synagogue attack in Manchester. In the course of a lengthy conversation, I asked him how he understood the flags and his comments were striking. 'When I returned from my holiday and saw the flags flying in Salford,' he told me, 'I felt the most tremendous sense of relief.'

So for that rabbi, the flags are claiming back a distinctive and confident British identity, lost by a failed experiment in multiculturalism that has left his own community deeply fearful. And he is far from alone.

One of the strengths of the Church of England is that we place well-trained, professional clergy and lay leaders in every neighbourhood in the country. That means that, in a culture of echo chambers and algorithms, we are uniquely placed to understand every side of a conflict.

When I contacted a group of church leaders from flag-flying communities in Lancashire, the results were intriguing. Of course they were aware of the darker side of this phenomenon. But they also understood the needs and fears of the people for whom the flags are welcome.

One priest told me of a volunteer in her church who assists with projects for the vulnerable and is good friends with asylum seekers in her congregation and yet she is still flying a flag because she feels that immigration has now 'gone too far.'

Another priest spoke of the flags as an outlet for the intense frustration of local people who feel left behind and ignored. Another spoke of them communicating a chronic disillusionment with a political system that has failed them.

For others there is frustration that their institutions seem willing to fly many different flags – the Ukraine flag or the LGBTQI+ flag – but perceive those same institutions to be embarrassed by the flag of their own nation.

Indeed, a chance to demonstrate a love for country was the most often cited reason. Many people take genuine pride in the flags flying over their communities as it gives them a chance to express pride in a nation that often seems to them to be overly apologetic about its past and embarrassed by patriotism.

Perhaps the most poignant reflection was a from a priest who has stood up to Tommy Robinson marchers on his estate and yet wrote, 'I think for some of those people who put up flags it was a desperate cry for their nation to take better care of them, like a neglected child trying to remind everyone that they're a part of the family too.

For many working-class communities, the globalisation and transnationalism that is viewed by those who hold power as the path to greater prosperity has been bad news. It has outsourced jobs, it has forced down wages so that many in-work people are still benefits-dependent and it has resulted in major demographic changes to communities over which local residents have no had no say.

Combined with years of grinding austerity and a political class that is quick to promise and slow to deliver, there is a powerful and intense anger in many parts of working-class Britain for which the flags have become a lightning conductor.

It seems now that one flag now symbolises two nations. And what is so alarming is that one side barely understands the other.

So how should Christians respond? A divided nation wants the established Church to take sides and indeed sees us as weak and vacillating if we do not. But the task of the Christian is not to take on one side or the other in every binary debate. It is to be on the Lord's side. And in this context, I think that means a twin response.

First it means attentively listening to everyone. We should hear the fears of those for whom flags are a sign of growing intolerance and so condemn racism and hatred. But equally importantly, even when we don't agree, we should understand and give voice to the anger of working-class communities who fear that the nation they love is being taken away from them. If that voice is not heard and attended to, then the far right will be all too happy to fill the vacuum that is left behind. In a divided nation, part of the vocation of the Church is to help one side to understand the other.

And second, it means speaking into the place of conflict words of Gospel peace. The Union Flag is more than a symbol of nation. It carries three crosses, each one pointing us to the saving work of Jesus Christ through which we are reconciled to the Father and so to each other. We listen, we understand, but above all we hold the cross high, for in that symbol is the only true and lasting source of unity.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now