I HAVE noticed in the past few years that many more flags are being flown: from people’s private houses, from pubs, and, indeed, from churches. My sense is that this trend started, or certainly accelerated, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when so many wanted to fly, or at any rate display, the Ukrainian flag as an act of solidarity.

Noticing this trend has set me thinking about flags themselves, the tradition of flying them, and the complex mix of things that they represent. No one knows when we first started flying flags, but there are depictions of what may be flags, or symbolic banners of some sort, as far back as the 11th century BC in China. On these Islands, we would look back to the standards of the Roman legions, and thence to the heraldic banners and colourful pennons of high chivalry, and, finally, the national flags with which we are familiar.

I am glad to see the modern revival of flag-flying, partly because it is a pleasure to see a little colour and heraldry in a comparatively drab “unarmorial age” (as Larkin terms it), and partly because it suggests something of local love, custom, and tradition: it seems to be very much a matter of local custom whether and when a church flies a flag, and whether it is the St George or the Union flag — or, indeed, something more local.

Norfolk has a very distinctive flag, and it is amazing how often you see it flying from pubs, businesses, and people’s homes. It is divided in half vertically into gold and black, with a white diagonal stripe, or bend, as it is called, bearing nine black ermine spots. It was originally the banner of arms of the 1st Earl of Norfolk, Ralph de Gael, but was officially recognised as Norfolk’s flag only after a campaign by a local resident, in 2014, about 900 years after the design was first associated with Norfolk. There is something at once persistent and defiant in that.

I am well aware of how flags and emblems can be manipulated and abused, and am conscious of the ambivalence of the ceremony of laying flags reverently down on altars. Who is submitting to whom? Are the nations and the regiments demanding a holy imprimatur, an uncritical validation from the Church, of all that they do? Or is it the other way round: that even the greatest worldly glory must be laid down at the foot of the cross, even as it is draped over the altar. “I lay in dust life’s glory down,” as the old hymn goes.

Some might say that flags fly only in the direction of the prevailing wind, and what if it is an ill wind? The present waves of populism and sometimes xenophobia would be all too happy with a little more flag-waving — though that is why, paradoxically, I like seeing the flag of St George flying from the occasional church tower. It redeems that flag, reclaims it from the extremists, and flies it for a proper love of locality which is woven in with the wider calls of charity and community.

It took a great Romantic poet to give us the radical image of a flag that flies against the prevailing wind. Lord Byron, writing at a time when liberty was everywhere being extinguished by reactionary forces in global politics, gave us, in Childe Harold, those thrilling and defiant lines — lines that Shelley used as the epigraph to his “Ode to Liberty”:
 

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.