Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots

A Life in Perspective

C. Keene

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137035646
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

Margaret, saint and 11th-century Queen of the Scots, remains an often-cited yet little-understood historical figure. Keene's analysis of sources in terms of both time and place – including her Life of Saint Margaret, translated for the first time – allows for an informed understanding of the forces that shaped this captivating woman.

CHAPTER 1

A NOBLE AND UNKNOWABLE LINEAGE

The parameters of Margaret’s life were shaped by the circumstances of her birth. Her father had been forced into exile as an infant, eventually settling in the kingdom of Hungary. Little is known with certainty about her mother beyond her name because her ancestry is clouded by conflicting tales told by a variety of contemporary sources. Together, this Anglo-Saxon prince named Edward and a woman named Agatha set the earliest boundaries defining Margaret’s identity.

Margaret’s paternal ancestry benefits from a wealth of contemporary or near-contemporary accounts. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle consists of a number of disparate but complexly-connected manuscripts consisting of largely contemporary annals in the vernacular. The D version is particularly concerned with the court of the kingdom of the Scots, containing an interpolation probably derived from an early version of Margaret’s Vita.¹ Other nearly contemporary works were composed by authors who had access to details of Margaret’s life through people who either knew, or knew of, her. The Anglo-Norman Benedictine monk William of Malmesbury (1095–1143) was a generally reliable historian. In a prefatory letter to the Gesta regum Anglorum addressed to Margaret’s son, King David, he asks that the king forward the work to his niece, Margaret’s granddaughter, Empress Matilda of England, daughter of Margaret’s daughter, Queen Edith/Matilda, who had originally commissioned the work. This letter is supplemented by one to the Empress Matilda and another to her half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, who supported her cause.² These associations indicate that the author was familiar with Margaret’s family.

The Chronicle of John of Worcester was commissioned in ca. 1095 by Wulfstan of Worcester, edited and added to by a monk named John, and completed in ca. 1143. It began as a world chronicle, based on the work of Marianus Scotus (completed 1076) and increasingly focused on English history, drawing on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede, among other sources, and later including Eadmer’s Historia Novorum, the Norman annals, and works by William of Malmesbury. The work often cited documents and texts verbatim. It tends to favor a pro-English point of view, but on the whole is historically factual. A tentative point of contact with Margaret’s family is that Ealdred, who was charged with retrieving Margaret’s family from Hungary, was bishop of Worcester.³

Orderic Vitalis (1075–ca. 1142), an Anglo-Norman monk at St. Évroul in Normandy, wrote a history that likewise avoids the pro-Norman bias of other chroniclers. In 1115, he visited England, spending time at Thorney and Worcester, where he had access to the above-mentioned Worcester chronicle. He also spent a few weeks at Crowland Abbey, the burial place of David’s father-in-law, Earl Waltheof of Northumbria, where he was inspired to include an account of the earl’s life in his Historia Ecclesiastica.⁴

Symeon was a monk whose residence at Durham coincided with Turgot’s tenure as prior (1087–1109). He compiled a history, Historia Regum, from a variety of sources (Kentish and Northumbrian annals, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, extracts from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum, the Worcester chronicle, among others), which he edited and expanded with some of his own material.⁵ His work is of interest for both its laudatory biography of Turgot, and its condemnatory description of King Malcolm.

The historical account written by Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon, was largely completed by 1130, but continued to 1154. He relied primarily on Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but the editor of Henry’s work surmises that he also employed local vernacular oral tradition for certain stories. Significantly, the earldom of Huntingdon was held by the Scottish royal family during Henry’s lifetime. His work was later accessed by Robert of Torigny and Roger of Howden for their chronicles.⁶

The tentacular connections between Ælred of Rievaulx and Margaret’s family make him an important witness. Born about 1110 in Hexham, he spent his youth at the court of Margaret’s son, David (1124–1153). In 1134 he entered the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in Yorkshire, where he held the position of abbot from 1147 until his death in 1167. His work and his interests remained centered on Scotland and northern England.⁷

Two points must be emphasized. First, these sources are intricately related. For example, John of Worcester drew upon William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum, and in turn influenced Orderic Vitalis’ Ecclesiastical History and Symeon of Durham’s Historia Regum.⁸ Second, these authors all had connections with either Margaret’s family, or people and places closely connected with her family. These associations between the various accounts increase their reliability when they are in agreement and make the discrepancies between them particularly revealing.

After 500 years of uninterrupted rule, the ancient royal house of Wessex was viciously pruned to two exiled infants: Margaret’s father, Edward, and his brother, Edmund. They were the only children of Edmund Ironside, who had been named king by the magnates in London after the death of his father, Æthelred, in April 1016.⁹ The kingdom that Edmund inherited had suffered years of serial invasions by Scandinavian armies, and was currently divided in its loyalties between the Anglo-Saxon monarchy and the prospect of peace promised by a settlement with the invaders. Although Edmund is extolled by the chroniclers for his valiant defense of the kingdom, nevertheless a war-weary representative assembly met at Southampton in 1016 to pledge fealty to Cnut, the younger son of the recently deceased Danish king, Swein Forkbeard. The two forces, the English under Edmund and the Scandinavian under Cnut, were well-matched and, rather than continuing to ravage the kingdom, the two contenders reached an uneasy truce at a meeting on the island of Olney in the Severn River, whereby Edmund ruled England south of the Thames in addition to East Anglia, Essex, and London, while Cnut held dominion over the northern reaches of the realm. Tellingly, and perhaps in tacit recognition of this untenable position, no provisions were made for subsequent inheritance. Instead, Cnut was to claim later that there had been an understanding that whoever should outlive the other would inherit the realm in its entirety, which made Edmund’s sudden death highly suspicious.

Edmund Ironside died on St. Andrew’s Day, November 30, 1016, having ruled for only seven months. His widow, Ealdgyth, was left with two infant sons, Edmund and Edward, as potential heirs to the English throne. Nothing is known of her natal family, from whom she might have expected to receive support.¹⁰ The sources identify her only as the widow of Sigeferth who, in conjunction with his brother Morcar, had been the lord of the Seven Boroughs.¹¹ Her first marriage had ended abruptly with the murder of the two brothers at a meeting hosted by Eadric Streona, ealdorman of Mercia. Suspicions regarding the king’s complicity in the crime were validated by the degree of opportunism evident in his subsequent actions; he imprisoned Ealdgyth at Malmesbury and confiscated all the property to which she was entitled after the death of her husband. Sometime between the Feast of the Assumption on August 15 and the Nativity of St. Mary on September 8, Edmund Ironside traveled to Malmesbury and married Ealdgyth against the protests of his father.¹² He now possessed the lordship of the strategically situated Seven Boroughs, providing him with a base of power and sufficient resources to wage his war against Cnut either with or without the support of his diminished father.¹³

At the time of her Edmund’s death Ealdgyth had given birth to at least one son, and possibly a second. Ealdgyth and Edmund were married August 15, 1015 at the earliest, meaning that the earliest possible date of birth for the first son would have been May 1016, leaving just enough time for a second child to be conceived before his father’s death in November 1016.¹⁴ The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however, records the exile of only one child, Edward.¹⁵ William of Malmesbury identifies two children, but seems to confuse the second one with the brother of Edmund Ironside, Eadwig.¹⁶ Only John of Worcester, the Dunfermline Vita, and Ælred of Rievaulx identify both Edward and Edmund.¹⁷

The position of the infants was precarious, as was made pointedly clear by the dismal fates of other contenders for Cnut’s newly-won and forcefully-held throne. Edmund Ironside’s brother, Eadwig the ætheling, was formally denied any claim to the throne at the Witan assembled by Cnut in London in 1016–1017, a ruling that Cnut then enforced in the extreme by first declaring Eadwig an outlaw and then ordering his assassination.¹⁸ The following year witnessed the execution of several high-ranking English noblemen who might have posed a threat: Æthelweard, the son of Æthelmær the Great; Brihtric, the son of Ælfheah of Devonshire; Northman, the son of Ealdorman Leofwine; and Eadric Streona.¹⁹ Eadric’s execution must be seen as part of a larger plan by Cnut to rid himself of the sons-in-law of Æthelred, each of whom could be viewed as a possible threat. Eadric had married Eadgyth, the daughter of Æthelred and his first wife.²⁰ Other sons-in-law of Æthelred were eliminated in one way or another: Athelstan died in battle in 1010; Ulfcytel, ealdorman of East Anglia, suffered a similar fate in 1016; and Uhtred, earl of Northumbria, was treacherously murdered while paying homage to Cnut in 1016.²¹ Even Thorkill the Tall, the new husband of Eadric Streona’s widow and a close retainer of Cnut’s, came under suspicion and was driven into exile.²² Æthelred’s two remaining sons, Edward and Alfred, remained safely in Normandy, their situation complicated because Cnut had married their mother, Æthelred’s widow, Emma.²³

The fact that Margaret’s father survived Cnut’s extermination intrigued chroniclers, prompting them to offer varied and conflicting explanations, but where some degree of consensus exists it is possible to posit a probable course of events. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Cnut had banished Edward to Hungary, with no mention of a brother or an intervening sojourn in Sweden.²⁴ According to William of Malmesbury, Edward and his brother “Eadwig” were sent to the king of the Swedes to be put to death. The king, however, took pity on the children and sent them to be raised in Hungary.²⁵ The Dunfermline Vita account is similar, reporting that Cnut, “fearing from shame to strike the sons of Edmund, he sent them to his relative, the king of the Swedes, as though for raising but more probably for killing,” but the king took pity on them and sent them to be fostered in Hungary.²⁶ Ælred of Rievaulx provides a very similar, but slightly abbreviated account.²⁷ John of Worcester blames Eadric Streona for urging Cnut to murder the children.²⁸

Denmark, rather than Sweden, is the destination given in a more elaborate account related by Geffrei Gaimar in his Estoire des Engleis, written in the French vernacular in the first half of the twelfth century in northern England. Gaimar was aware of the chronicles of Symeon of Durham, John of Worcester, William of Malmesbury, and Henry of Huntingdon, and like Henry probably used a northern recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and oral accounts.²⁹ His account is a highly romanticized history of England, written for the entertainment of the secular aristocracy rather than an ecclesiastical or a monastic audience. It was therefore more interested in co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.  A Noble and Unknowable Lineage
• 2.  An Exile in Hungary
• 3.  An Anglo-Saxon Princess
• 4.  A Wife of the King
• 5.  A Queen of the Scots
• 6.  A Pious Woman
• 7.  The Cornerstone of Margaret’s Cult
• 8.  A Dynastic Saint
• 9.  A Canonized Saint
• Conclusion: “Your Margaret, My Margaret, Our Margaret”
• Appendix: Translation of the Dunfermline Vita
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index