Saint Margaret of England

Saint Margaret of England is a twelfth-century Cistercian nun whose memory has been preserved chiefly in later hagiographical notices rather than in contemporary charters or chronicles. According to the traditional account, she was born in Hungary of English parentage. Her mother is said to have been a kinswoman of Saint Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered in 1170. The precise social standing of her family and the reasons for their presence in Hungary are not recorded in sources that can be independently verified, though England and the Kingdom of Hungary did maintain dynastic and ecclesiastical contacts in the high Middle Ages. No reliable source supplies a year of birth, and she should not be confused with Saint Margaret of Scotland, who was likewise born in Hungary to an English family of royal rank in the previous century.

Following the death of her mother, Margaret left Hungary in the company of the woman who had been her nurse. The two undertook an extended pilgrimage that took them first to the Holy Land. They are said to have visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the principal sites of Christian devotion in Palestine. From the eastern Mediterranean they traveled west, pausing at the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat in Catalonia. Their wanderings eventually brought them into the Massif Central of France, to the diocese of Le Puy (Le Puy-en-Velay) in the Auvergne.

There Margaret entered the Cistercian monastery of Sauve-Bénite (also written Sauvebenite). The Cistercian Order, founded at Cîteaux at the end of the eleventh century and greatly expanded in the twelfth under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, maintained houses of nuns as well as of monks and was known for a strict interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict. Margaret took the Cistercian habit and remained at Sauve-Bénite for the rest of her life. Traditional notices describe her as living in holiness within the cloister, but they furnish few concrete incidents or miracles that can be dated or corroborated. She died at the monastery in 1192.

Margaret of England was not the object of a formal papal canonization of the type that the medieval papacy increasingly reserved to itself from the late twelfth century onward. Her cult appears to have been local, associated with her convent and with Cistercian liturgical calendars, and she is commemorated on 3 February. Historians distinguish her from other well-known saints of the same name, including Margaret of Antioch and Margaret of Scotland. Beyond the outline of pilgrimage and monastic profession given in the traditional vita, little can be established with certainty. She remains an obscure but authentic witness to the mobility of twelfth-century pilgrims and to the attraction of the Cistercian reform for women of English origin on the Continent.