Margaret, ST, Scottish queen, was born about 1047 in Hungary, and from 1057 was brought up at the court of her great-uncle, Edward the Confessor, with Lanfranc for her spiritual instructor. In 1068, with her mother and sister and her boy brother, Edgar the Atheling (q.v.), she fled from Northumberland to Scotland. Young, lovely, learned, and pious, she won the heart of the rude Scottish king, Malcolm Canmore (q.v.), who next year wedded her at Dunfermline. 'Perhaps,' says Skene, 'there is no more beautiful character recorded in history than that of Margaret. For purity of motives, for an earnest desire to benefit the people among whom her lot was cast, for a deep sense of religion and great personal piety, for the unselfish performance of whatever duty lay before her, and for entire self-abnegation she is unsurpassed.' She did much to civilise the northern realm, and still more to assimilate the old Celtic church to the rest of Christendom on such points as the due commencement of Lent, the Easter communion, the observance of Sunday, and marriage within the prohibited degrees. She built, too, a stately church at Dunfermline, and re-founded Iona. She bore her husband six sons and two daughters, and died three days after him, in Edinburgh Castle, on 16th November 1093. Innocent IV. canonised her in 1250. Her head, which had found its way from Dunfermline to Douay, was lost in the French Revolution; but her remaining relics are said to have been enshrined by Philip II. in the Escorial.
See the Latin Life by her confessor Turgot, Bishop of St Andrews (Eng. trans. by Fr. Forbes-Leith, 1884); Skene's Celtic Scotland (vol. ii. 1877); and Bellesheim's History of the Catholic Church of Scotland (Eng. trans. 1887).