Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Queen of Scotland, Reformer of the Church
November 16 · d. 1093
also known as Saint Margaret of Scotland, Margaret of Wessex, Margaret of England
Margaret was an English princess, raised in exile, who became queen of the Scots and left that kingdom a saint. Granddaughter of an English king and married to Malcolm III about 1070, she brought the worship of the Scottish church back into step with the wider Western communion, founded and endowed churches, and was known through her lands for daily charity to the poor while keeping a hidden life of prayer and fasting. She died at Edinburgh in 1093, days after her husband and eldest son were killed in battle, and was declared a saint in 1250. Her feast is November 16.
Margaret was born about 1045 into the exiled house of the old English kings. Her grandfather was Edmund Ironside, who had fought the Danes for the crown of England; when that royal line was driven from the land, her father Edward carried the family far to the east, to the Christian court of the kingdom of Hungary. It was there, in exile, that Margaret was raised and given an education rare for a woman of her time. She grew up devout and lettered, at home in the Scriptures and in books, a princess of a country she had never seen.
Then the world she had been promised came apart. In 1066 the Normans conquered England, and the exiles saw their last hope of a place among the English fade. The family took ship north all the same, and a storm caught them and drove their vessel onto the coast of Scotland, where it was wrecked. Tradition still names the landing place St Margaret's Hope, on the Firth of Forth.
The king of the Scots was Malcolm, called Canmore, a hard man and a warrior who had won his throne in blood. He took in the shipwrecked strangers, and he lost his heart to the grave, learned princess the sea had brought him. About the year 1070 he married her. It was an unequal match in all but strength of will. Malcolm could barely read; Margaret had been formed in the gospel from childhood. Yet the marriage held, and the queen began, slowly, to change the king, and through the king a court, and through the court a kingdom.
Malcolm loved her enough to be led by her. Though he could not read the books she prayed from, he would take them in his hands and kiss the ones she loved best, and he had them bound in gold and gems for her sake. When she spoke of the faith he listened. The church of the Scots had drifted in some of its customs from the practice of the wider church, and Margaret set herself to draw it back. She called the churchmen together and made the case, over days of argument, for keeping Lent from its proper beginning, for receiving Communion at Easter, for keeping the Lord's Day holy. She did not speak the language of the Scots, so the king sat at her side and turned her words for both parties: a soldier interpreting his wife's theology to his own bishops.
She built. At Dunfermline in Scotland, where she had been married, she raised a church of the Holy Trinity and brought monks to serve it, and it became the resting place of her line. She restored the ferry across the Forth so that pilgrims could cross to the shrine of Saint Andrew, and to this day the crossing at Queensferry carries her name.
But what the poor remembered was her hands. Before she ate, Margaret fed the hungry; each morning little orphans were carried in to her, and in the words of Turgot her confessor, in William Forbes-Leith's translation, "she did not think it beneath her to take them upon her knee, and to get their pap ready for them." She "washed the feet of six poor persons," in the same translation, and gave them alms to ease their want. At the great feasts, before the royal table was served, the king on one side and the queen on the other waited on the poor with their own hands. When famine came she emptied the treasury, and once, the story goes, Malcolm caught her carrying off his own coin to give away, and only laughed and let her keep the theft.
Under the crown and the royal robe she wore another garment against the skin, and kept a rule the court never saw. She rose in the cold of the night to pray, she fasted until her health broke under it, and she read and questioned the learned men about the word of God as though her life depended on the answer. The crown was the least of what she carried.
She bore Malcolm eight children and raised them in the faith that had shaped her. Three of her sons would reign in turn as kings of Scots, and her daughter Matilda would cross the border to become queen of England; from Margaret the royal houses of both kingdoms descend. The exile's daughter, who had owned nothing, became the mother of a line.
The end came in the autumn of 1093. Malcolm and their eldest son Edward rode south to war and were both killed at Alnwick, in the north of England. Margaret was already ill and worn thin with her fasts, lying in her chamber in the castle at Edinburgh. She asked for the Black Cross, a fragment of the true Cross she had always kept near, "a cross, called the Black Cross, which she always held in the greatest veneration," and held it. When her son Edgar came back from the army she asked him for word of his father and his brother. He could not bring himself to tell her, but she pressed him until he did. She did not cry out. In the same translation of Turgot she gave thanks instead: "All praise be to Thee, Almighty God, who hast been pleased that I should endure such deep sorrow at my departing." Then, turning to the Cross in her hands, she began the prayer the priest says before receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord. In Forbes-Leith's translation of Turgot's Life she prayed:
Lord Jesus Christ, who according to the will of the Father, through the co-operation of the Holy Ghost, hast by Thy death given life to the world, deliver me.
As she said the words deliver me, she died. They carried her to Dunfermline, to the church she had raised, and laid her there. The kingdom she had prayed over did not forget her, nor did the church she had mended and the poor she had fed; and in time the whole church took up what her deathbed had begun, and called the shipwrecked exile a saint. The last word on her lips was a prayer to be delivered, and the church has never doubted it was heard.
How we know Margaret is, almost entirely, through one book. Her confessor and chaplain, Turgot, a monk of Durham who later became prior of Durham and bishop of St Andrews, wrote a Life of St Margaret within a decade or so of her death, at the request of her daughter Matilda, by then queen of England, expressly to set the mother's holiness before the daughter. Turgot writes as an admirer and a devout churchman, and he says as much: he is recording sanctity, not compiling annals, and he chooses his scenes to show a soul. That aim is no reason to distrust what he reports. He had heard Margaret's confessions and stood close to her household; he writes of things he saw or was told by those who saw them, and where he can be checked against the royal records he holds up. Alongside Turgot, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Scottish and English royal notices, and the later accounts of Aelred of Rievaulx and Orderic Vitalis fill in the frame around him.
The outward life is secure. Margaret was born about 1045 in Hungary, daughter of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, and of Agatha, a kinswoman of the imperial house of the Continent. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 the family came to Scotland, where about 1070 Margaret married Malcolm III. She held councils reforming the customs of the Scottish church, founded the church at Dunfermline, and restored the pilgrim ferry across the Forth. She died on 16 November 1093 at Edinburgh, three days after Malcolm and their son Edward were killed at the battle of Alnwick on 13 November. She was buried at Dunfermline. Pope Innocent IV declared her a saint in 1250, and her relics were translated to a new shrine at Dunfermline in the same year.
Turgot describes the reforming councils in some detail: assemblies held over three days, with Malcolm interpreting between the queen and the Gaelic-speaking clergy, on the beginning of Lent, Communion at Easter, the keeping of Sunday, forbidden marriages, and irregularities in the Mass. The matters were specific customs, not a wholesale remaking; where later writers pictured Margaret abolishing a native Celtic church and imposing Rome, Turgot's own account is narrower, a queen correcting particular usages she judged to have strayed. Historians reading him now tend to read the reforms that smaller way, and to note how much of the received portrait is Turgot's devout framing rather than the plain record; the framing and the facts can be held apart without discarding either.
One relic of Margaret's own devotion survives. A small illuminated Gospel-lectionary that belonged to her is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS. Lat. liturg. f. 5). Added to its opening leaves is a late eleventh-century Latin poem that records the single miracle told of her: the book fell into a river, and was drawn out again unharmed. The manuscript is real and datable, and the verses that carry the story of its rescue were written into it within living memory of the queen who owned it. Whether the water spared the little Gospel-book as the poem says or not, the poem and the book together are part of how Margaret was remembered, and among the oldest witnesses to it.
Margaret is kept on November 16, the day of her death, in Scotland and in the calendar of the Church of England; the Roman calendar long observed her on June 10 and moved her feast to November 16 in 1969. She is honoured as a patron of Scotland. At Edinburgh Castle the small stone chapel that bears her name, raised by her son David I in her memory, is the oldest surviving building in the city. Dunfermline, where she was married, worshipped, and was buried, became a great medieval pilgrimage shrine, and the Forth crossing at North and South Queensferry still remembers the ferry she gave to pilgrims bound for St Andrews. The Black Cross she died holding, a reliquary of the true Cross described in the next century by Aelred of Rievaulx, passed to her son David and became famous as the Black Rood of Scotland, before it was carried off from Edinburgh Castle in 1296 and eventually lost. In art she is shown as a crowned queen, most often with a book or with a cross in her hands, and sometimes with the poor she served. Turgot plays on her name, which means a pearl, and the church has remembered her under that figure ever since: a pearl of great price set in a rough kingdom.
Life of St Margaret, Queen of Scotland (Vita S. Margaretae Scotorum Reginae)(Latin, c. 1100)
The one near-contemporary source (written within a decade of her death, c. 1100, for her daughter Matilda): her Hungarian upbringing, the marriage to Malcolm, the reforming councils, her charity and asceticism, the Gospel-book miracle, and the deathbed with the Black Cross.
Public domain: Forbes-Leith translation, Internet Archive, Full online text, liturgies.net
St Margaret, Queen of Scotland(English, 1993 (rev. 2001))
The short, readable life, written for the ninth centenary of her death and warm to the saint the sources describe; the natural first book for a general reader.
Public domain: Blackwell's
Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots: A Life in Perspective(English, 2013)
The fuller scholarly study, setting Turgot's Life in context and including a fresh translation of it; for the reader who wants to go deeper.
Public domain: Palgrave Macmillan (publisher)
Primary sources and principal hagiography. Everything of substance about Margaret comes from Turgot's Life of St Margaret, Queen of Scotland, written within a decade of her death for her daughter Matilda. It records her upbringing, her marriage, the reforming councils with Malcolm interpreting, her charity and asceticism, and her death holding the Black Cross. It is free in William Forbes-Leith's translation at the Internet Archive and in full online at liturgies.net.
Recommended modern biography. Alan J. Wilson's St Margaret, Queen of Scotland (John Donald, 1993; revised 2001) is the short, readable life, written for the ninth centenary of her death and warm to the saint the sources describe; the natural first book for a general reader. Catherine Keene's Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots: A Life in Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) is the fuller scholarly study, setting Turgot's Life in its context and including a fresh translation of it, for the reader who wants to go deeper.
Further reading. Rebecca Rushforth's St Margaret's Gospel-Book: The Favourite Book of a Queen of Scotland (Bodleian Library, 2007) studies and reproduces the surviving manuscript and the poem of the river miracle. Aelred of Rievaulx's Genealogy of the Kings of the English (c. 1153) gives the earliest description of the Black Rood.
Online resources. Turgot's Life is at the Internet Archive (Forbes-Leith translation) and complete at liturgies.net; the Gospel-book itself can be viewed in the Digital Bodleian.
British (Received Pronunciation): Dunfermline /dʌnˈfɜːrmlɪn/
Readings for a Reformer
Jeremiah 1:4–10Psalm 461 Corinthians 3:10–23Matthew 5:13–20
O God, by your grace your servant Margaret, kindled by the flame of your love, became a burning and shining light in your Church, turning pride into humility and error into truth: Grant that we may be set aflame with the same spirit of love and discipline, and walk before you as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.