Friday, September 7, 2012

Building the United Kingdom Flag

It seemed like it was time to get this post going. I was going to do a St. George's cross post, but that'll wait. This post had been eating at me.

Okay, so there is a country called England, there is an island called Great Britain, there are two major islands that, along with a few small ones, comprise the British Isles, and there are four countries that make up the United Kingdom. Those countries are England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

England and Wales worked out some kind of agreement, because the Welsh flag is conspicuously missing from this collage.

So...as we've seen earlier, here's Scotland:


And here's England:


Once the union was fully realized between Scotland and England, they combined their flags: it looks like they cut the red cross of St. George from the English flag--with a bit of bordered white--and stitched it onto the Scottish flag.

This is the Union Jack:


When the Union loosened their grip on Ireland, most of the Protestants moved to the north, and a collection of counties stayed loyal to the crown and wanted in on the union. To modify the flag once again, they decided to use the cross of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland as the piece to add:


And it can be seen in the white saltire below, giving us the current flag of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland:


Apparently, the religious community is very strict about which saints' crosses are allowed to be used for national flags, and how those saints were killed is the main thing. St. Andrew and St. George are okay, but not St. Patrick nor St. David, which I'll post in a second.

I mentioned earlier that the Welsh flag is sorely missing in the collage. Well, how would you work it in:


The next is the flag of the cross of St. David, which the Welsh also consider a nationalistic image. It seems like it might be better suited for the Great Collage, but it'd still be a challenge:

(It must look a little odd here.)

Not too many other flags were built like this over time.

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