The parish of St George was an area within the Manor and Hundred of Barton Regis when it was officially created in 1751 by an act of parliament which detached it from the out-parish of St Philip & Jacob in Bristol.

By the 1750s the Manor and Hundred was held by Thomas Chester of Knole Park in Almondsbury, and it was he who gifted the land for the churchyard, parsonage, and church of St George the Martyr, which was finally consecrated in 1756.

Prior to the creation of the parish of St George the general name of the area was Easton, part of which was Redfield, which indicated that it was a distinct cleared and cultivated area. More anciently it had been known as “Bertune”, (the barton or farm), of Bristol Castle, the purpose of which was to provide provision, forage, and other necessities for the garrison of that fortress, while as it was then part of the holdings of the Crown, the Hundred received the name of Barton Regis.

Close to the new church at the junction of the Bath and London roads on the southern edge of the Kingswood Forest there also stood a medieval standing cross, one of the over 12,000 or so which are thought to have originally existed in England, however, today less than 2000, with or without cross-heads, seem to have survived.

These crosses were used within settlements as places for carrying out preaching and public services, making proclamations and penance, as well as being employed to mark boundaries between parishes, property, or settlements.

The most common form was the stepped cross, in which a shaft or column was set into a socket stone raised upon a flight of steps, and the example in St George was of this type. Such crosses remained current from around the eleventh or twelfth centuries until after the Reformation, but their subsequent survival has been variable, being much affected by local conditions, attitudes and religious sentiment.

In particular, many cross-heads were destroyed by iconoclasts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The St George cross has been known locally as “Don John’s Cross” since at least the early seventeenth century, a fact confirmed by the annotation on a rough sketch of the extant cross which appeared on a reproduction of a map of the Kingswood Forest originally drawn up in 1610.

This shows that the cross featured a three stepped base topped with a socket stone and shaft. By the late nineteenth century the original map was in the possession of Thomas William Chester-Masters of Knole Park and Cirencester Abbey, who made it available to the lithographic printer Lavars & Company of Bristol.

Copies were then included inside the front cover of “The History of Kingswood Forest (including all the ancient manors and villages in the neighbourhood”), published in 1891 by A. Braine.

‘The History of the County of Gloucester; compressed, and brought down  to the year 1803’, by the Reverend Thomas Rudge B.D., Gloucester, 1802, volume 2, also contained some notes on St George in the Barton  Regis Hundred on pages 376 to 378. The entry recorded that, “In the highway, about 200 yards west of the church, stood Don John’s Cross, which was a circular column of freestone, raised on an octagonal base.

What remained of it is said to have been placed near an adjacent house, when the church was built; but its memory is now preserved only by a sign at the door of an inn adjoining the spot. The legendary tale attached to this pillar is, that the corpse of one Don John, a noble Spaniard, rested here on the way to its place of interment, probably to Spain, from the port of Bristol, if any credit is to be given to the story.”

Rudge is almost certainly correct in regarding the tale of Don John as an urban myth, as the Gloucestershire Archives holds a bundle of 24  documents (D674a T/108) deposited by the Chester-Masters family.

These are leases in the Manor of Barton Regis and are dated between 1648 and 1750. One of these contains details relating to “Cottages at/near Dungeons alias Don John’s Cross on Bristol-Bath, Bristol-Marshfield and Bristol-London roads.”

Consequently, it would appear to confirm that ‘Don John’s’ is nothing more than a corruption of ‘Dungeons’, while the word ‘dungeon’ was originally derived from the French, ‘donjon’, meaning the keep, or main tower, of a castle. The first recorded instance of the word in Middle English, which was spoken from shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the late fifteenth century, was near the beginning of the fourteenth century when it still had the same meaning as ‘donjon’.

By the early twentieth century the remains of Don John’s Cross, which was probably used as a preaching cross, in addition to acting as a boundary marker between the holdings of Bristol Castle and the Kingswood Forest, were to be found in the garden of the local vicarage, but are now located outside the library in St George.