Edmund of Scotland

Edmund of Scotland was a son of King Malcolm III of Scotland and his second wife, Margaret of Wessex, later venerated as Saint Margaret of Scotland. He belonged to the dynasty later called the House of Dunkeld. His mother was a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside of England and the sister of Edgar Ætheling. Edmund was one of several children of this marriage; his full brothers included Edward, who died with their father in 1093, Ethelred, who entered the church and became abbot of Dunkeld, and the future kings Edgar, Alexander I, and David I. His sisters included Edith, who as Matilda became queen of England by marriage to Henry I, and Mary, who married Eustace III, Count of Boulogne. He also had an older half-brother, Duncan, born of Malcolm’s earlier marriage to Ingibiorg Finnsdottir. No contemporary source records Edmund’s exact year or place of birth. He was born in the Kingdom of Scotland after his parents’ marriage in 1070 and grew up in a court that mixed Gaelic custom with the Anglo-Saxon and continental religious culture fostered by Margaret.

The deaths of Malcolm III and of Edmund’s brother Edward at Alnwick in November 1093, followed within days by the death of Queen Margaret, opened a succession crisis. Malcolm’s brother Donald III seized the kingship and expelled many of the English and Norman dependents associated with Margaret’s household. Duncan, who had been a hostage in England, returned in 1094 with the backing of William II Rufus and briefly reigned as Duncan II, but he was forced to send away his foreign supporters and was killed later that year. The Annals of Ulster record that Duncan was slain by Domnall and Edmund, described as his brothers. English and later Scottish writers likewise place Edmund in Donald’s party and implicate him in Duncan’s death. William of Malmesbury, writing a generation later, presented Edmund as a partner in Donald’s rule, an arrangement that may have joined Edmund’s standing as a son of Malcolm to Donald’s age and Gaelic legitimacy. Edmund was not entered among the kings of Scots in the principal medieval king-lists.

In 1097 that settlement collapsed. With the approval of William Rufus, Edgar Ætheling led an army into Scotland on behalf of Edmund’s younger brother Edgar. Donald and Edmund were defeated. Donald was captured and, according to later accounts, blinded; he died in custody a few years later. Edmund was taken prisoner and spent the remainder of his life in confinement. William of Malmesbury reports that he became a monk in prison and that, when dying, he asked that his chains be hung over his tomb as a sign of repentance for earlier cruelty. A later tradition, not confirmed by eleventh- or twelfth-century narrative sources, places that monastic confinement at the Cluniac priory of Montacute in Somerset. The year and place of his death are not securely recorded. He vanishes from the political record after 1097 and is not known to have married or to have left children.

Later medieval Scottish historians, including John of Fordun in the fourteenth century, treated Edmund mainly as a secondary figure in the struggle between the sons of Margaret and the older Gaelic line represented by Donald. He was not the object of a recognized saint’s cult, unlike his mother Margaret, whose sanctity was formally acknowledged in the thirteenth century, and he has no feast day in the principal martyrologies. Modern reconstruction of his life rests chiefly on the Annals of Ulster, scattered notices related to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and William of Malmesbury’s account. The personal details of his monastic profession, the house in which he was held, and the date of his death remain uncertain. What can be said with confidence is that a son of Malcolm III and Margaret who shared in the overthrow of Duncan II ended his life as a monk in custody, remembered by at least one English historian as a penitent.