ST/JD/33

Margaret, Queen of Scotland

Gender

Female

Floruit (period)

None

Floruit date range

1043 - 16/11/1093

Description

Consort of Malcolm III, King of Scots. The eldest child of Edward Ætheling (d. 1057) and his wife, Agatha, who was a kinswoman of the emperor Henry II (r. 1002--24). Margaret's father was one of the two sons of Edmund Ironside (d. 1016), briefly king of England in succession to his father, Æthelred. In 1068, Margaret, her mother, and her brother and sister, Edgar Ætheling and Christina, fled to the Scottish court. In either 1069 or 1070 Margaret was married to the Scottish king, Malcolm III, at Dunfermline. It was said that the marriage was against her inclinations, since she wished to enter the religious life. The marriage lasted twenty-three years and produced six sons and two daughters who all survived to adulthood. Three sons, Edgar (d. 1107), Alexander (d. 1124), and David (d. 1153), became kings of Scots, while the elder daughter, Matilda (d. 1118), otherwise known as Edith, became queen of England in 1100 on marrying Henry I. Margaret converted the church in which she was married, Holy Trinity at Dunfermline, into a Benedictine priory. Objective evidence shows a woman of outstanding piety and religious devotion. Queen Margaret died at Edinburgh Castle on 16 November 1093, three days after Malcolm III had been killed near Alnwick while leading his fifth raid into Northumberland; she was buried before the high altar in Dunfermline Priory church. Although there developed in Scotland, from soon after her death, a cult of St Margaret which seems to have had a genuinely popular character, it was only in 1249--50, in response to a campaign organized by Scotland's most senior clergy, that the papacy authorized her formal canonization. The greater part of the information regarding her is derived from the Life written c.1100--07, at the request of her daughter Queen Matilda, by Turgot, then prior of Durham but formerly for some years Margaret's chaplain. G.W.S. Barrow, 'Margaret [St Margaret]', ODNB.