The Saint Alban's Cross is a yellow saltire on a blue field. It is found in several flags, notably that of the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban, previously a Benedictine monastery, and the city of St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK. It is also the flag used, since around the time of Henry III, for the Kingdom of Mercia in the English Midlands.
This design is often erroneously referred to as a "yellow Saint Andrew's Cross", although a modern Saint Andrew's Cross is blue and white. It is possible, however, that the colours of the cross and connection with Saint Alban is partly through a link with Saint Andrew; a chapel of Saint Andrew was from an early period attached to the Abbey of Saint Alban, and this may be part of the origin of the design.
Famous quotes containing the words saint and/or cross:
“There’s so much saint in the worst of them,
And so much devil in the best of them,
That a woman who’s married to one of them,
Has nothing to learn of the rest of them.”
—Helen Rowland (1875–1950)
“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour
high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning
home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)