Queen Margaret

Saint Margaret of Scotland, commonly known as Queen Margaret, was born about 1045 in the Kingdom of Hungary, where her family lived in exile from England. She was the daughter of Edward the Exile, son of King Edmund Ironside of England, and of Agatha, a noblewoman of continental origin whose exact family connections remain uncertain among historians. Margaret was raised with her sister Christina and her brother Edgar Aetheling in a household that combined English royal identity with the Christian culture of eleventh-century Hungary. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the family returned to England, where Edgar was briefly acknowledged as king by some English leaders but never established effective rule. They then left England; medieval writers relate that a storm carried their ship to the Scottish coast, where King Malcolm III gave them refuge.

Margaret married Malcolm III, called Malcolm Canmore, around 1070, probably at Dunfermline. As queen she shaped the manners of the Scottish court and worked to bring Scottish church life into closer conformity with the Latin Christianity of western Europe. She and Malcolm had eight children recorded by name: Edward, Edmund, Ethelred, Edgar, Alexander, David, Edith (who as Matilda became queen of England as the wife of Henry I), and Mary (who married Eustace III of Boulogne). Through these offspring she became an ancestress of later Scottish and English kings. Her confessor Turgot of Durham, writing at the request of her daughter Matilda, described a queen who joined royal dignity to fasting, night prayer, and personal service to the poor.

Margaret promoted Benedictine monasticism by founding or richly endowing the church at Dunfermline, which became a Benedictine abbey. She supported pilgrims traveling to St Andrews, including by maintaining a ferry across the Firth of Forth, later remembered in the name Queensferry. She is credited with encouraging Sunday rest, more regular reception of communion, and the reform of local customs that contemporary churchmen judged irregular. Turgot and later tradition also associate her with a chapel at Edinburgh Castle. She was known for feeding orphans and beggars, washing the feet of the poor, and ransoming English captives held in Scotland.

In November 1093 Malcolm III and their eldest son Edward were killed on a raid into Northumbria at Alnwick. Margaret, already seriously ill in Edinburgh Castle, learned of their deaths and died on 16 November 1093. She was buried at Dunfermline before the high altar of the church she had favoured. Pilgrims visited her tomb, and in 1250 Pope Innocent IV canonized her. The Scottish Reformation later wrecked her shrine and scattered her relics; her head was for a time preserved on the Continent. Her feast is kept on 16 November in the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. She is invoked as a patron of Scotland, of queens, of widows, of large families, and of learning, and she remains among the best-documented royal saints of the eleventh-century British Isles.