The history of St. Valentine’s Day appears to have its roots in a pagan fertility festival known as Lupercalia. This was celebrated in Rome at around the third Century AD and promoted health and fertility with lots of high-spirited antics which would cause one or two red faces today...

Like many of the old pagan festivals, the early Christian Church merged martyred saints with medieval romantic traditions and in 496 AD, Pope Gelasius formally declared 14 February to be St. Valentine’s Day, honouring Valentine of Rome, a Priest or Bishop executed around 270 AD for secretly ministering to persecuted Christians.

The first real association of St. Valentine’s Day with romantic love, or ‘love birds’, derives from Geoffrey Chaucer. Dating from 1382, Chaucer celebrated the engagement of the 15-year-old King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia via a poem, in which he wrote: For this was on St. Valentine’s Day, when every bird (fowl) cometh to choose his mate.

But, of course, it was a Frenchman who is recorded as sending the very first Valentine's love note to his sweetheart. Charles, the Duke of Orléans was held captive in the Tower of London after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and in the note he sent to his wife, the duke talks of his love of “my very sweet Valentine”.

By 1601, St. Valentine’s Day appears to be an established part of English tradition and soon became standard practice, with a helpful guide, ‘The Young Man’s Valentine Writer’, being published in 1797 - presumably because the Young Men were so besotted that they could not think of their own verses. But it was not until the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840 that sending anonymous Valentine's Day Cards became affordable for ordinary folk. And all over the country, printers started to mass-produce the Valentine Cards that we recognise today, complete with pre-prepared verses and pretty pictures.

In 1847, this quaint English tradition was introduced to the unsuspecting American public and the rest, as they say, is history… In the US alone, approximately 190 million Valentine cards, which may have made Hallmark the Company it is today, are now sent each year; worldwide, the figure is estimated to be closer to 1 billion.

But of course, with the advent of the World Wide Web and social media, a new chapter in the story of St Valentine has just begun.