Introduction

Abstract

Margaret, the other queen of Scots, is a noteworthy historical figure of eleventhcentury Europe (ca. 1045/6–1093), who has nevertheless not yet been the subject of a critical biography. The basic facts of her life, absent embellishments or interpretation, are briefly sketched out as follows. Her father was the Anglo-Saxon prince, Edward, who had been exiled as an infant after the death of his father, King Edmund Ironside (d. 1016), and the succession of the Danish conqueror King Cnut (d. 1035). Edward journeyed to the kingdom of Hungary, where he married a woman named Agatha and had three children: Margaret, Christina, and Edgar. In 1057, Edward the Exile, as he has come to be known, returned to England with his family as the acknowledged heir to the Anglo-Saxon throne of the childless Edward the Confessor (d. 1066). He died within days of landing in England, and any hope that his son would assume the throne was firmly quashed by the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Margaret and her family fled to the kingdom of the Scots, where Margaret married King Malcolm III. The couple had eight children who survived to adulthood, of whom three became kings of Scotland in succession and one became queen of England. Margaret died in 1093, within three days of the deaths of both her husband and her eldest son. She was buried at the Church of the Holy Trinity, later Dunfermline Abbey, which quickly became the center of a cult centered on her shrine. In the mid-thirteenth century she was the subject of a canonization process.KeywordsContextual ApproachCanonization ProcessManuscript VersionTerminus Post QuemNorman ConquestThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.