Up a Tree Extra: I didn't know Jack about the Union Jack

 Last time I mentioned that King James I, frustrated over Parliament's ability to broker a deal for the formal union of Scotland and England -- the two realms he reigned over -- created the very first version of the Union Jack:

Now, he did this by combining the flag of St. George, by this time the default patron saint of England, and the flag of St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland.

St. George: 

St. Andrew: 

It's fairly easy to see how this came about.

Of course you'll recognize almost immediately that this is very close to the modern day flag, but not quite there.

The National Flag of Great Britain: 

You'll notice the extra red stripe. This represents represents Ireland, back in its united days. 

A bit about the saints. St. George is thought to be a Christian Roman soldier -- in the days when the Romans persecuted Christians. He refused to recant his faith and was martyred. He became England's saint through the influence of numerous kings, mostly Plantangenent, who may have been fascinated with him because of his military associations.

St. Andrew was St. Peter's brother in the New Testament and is associated with Scotland in two separate legends. One holds that Andrew actually traveled as far as the village Fife in Scotland. The village is known nowadays as St. Andrews. Yes, that St. Andrews. 

The other legend holds that a man named Rule brought relics associated with Andrew to the village.Another legend explains why the cross on his flag is titled over. Andrew was reportedly crucified as a martyr but believed he was unworthy to be crucified the same way Jesus was and requested the cross be laid over. 

Patrick is, as you no doubt know, the saint most associated with Ireland. Irish invaders kidnapped him from England and carried him to the Emerald Isle. He later escaped to his homeland but returned after his conversion to Christianity as a missionary. 

Now, despite the flags, the actual crosses associated with Patrick and Andrew look nothing like the crosses on the flags. Andrew's is in the shape of the Greek letter tau, while Patrick's looks like a squashed down Celtic cross. Patrick's flag was created in the 1780s by a group called the Order of St. Patrick and looks like this:

One more thing you need to know. You obviously can't get the current Union Jack just by layering the emblems and colors on top of each other. That's because of the rules of heraldry, which I won't go into in any depth. Just know that the rules, which may at some point may have been codified into law, state that certain colors cannot be placed on top of each other nor can they touch. 

Blue and red are two of those colors, so they have to be separated by white, giving us the final product. The rules started out as commonsense principles that make designs and letters more visible. But in time, as we are often wont to do, people made them into inflexible rules that in many circumstances are now cheerfully ignored.