Saint Margaret of Scotland

Saint Margaret of Scotland was an English-born princess who became queen through her marriage to Malcolm III. She promoted religious reform, charitable work and closer connections between the Scottish court and wider European Christianity.

Margaret founded or supported churches and encouraged changes in worship and court culture. Canonised in the thirteenth century, she became an enduring model of pious queenship and a key dynastic ancestor of later Scottish kings.

In Nigel Tranter’s Margaret the Queen, Driven from England after the Norman Conquest, Margaret of Wessex arrives in Scotland with the blood of the old English royal house and little expectation of becoming a queen.