Abstract
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.
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Notes
Dorothy Whitelock, David C. Douglas and Susie I. Tucker, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A Revised Edition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961). This edition is particularly useful because it offers parallel translations of the various versions. A new series treats each version of the chronicle separately. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vols. 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 17 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984-). For the supposition that the entry in 1067 is derived from a version of Margaret’s vita, see Whitelock, “Introduction,” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, xvi.
For the D version’s interest in Margaret’s family, see G. P. Cubbin, “Introduction,” in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A Collaborative Edition, Volume 6, MS D, ed. G. P. Cubbin (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), lxxiv.
William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, vol. 1, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, completed by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 2–13.
See Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 166–85.
John of Worcester, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk, trans. J. Bray and P. McGurk, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). A sub anno citation is used for the text. Notes are cited by volume and page number.
Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–1980).
Cited by volume and page number. See also Marjorie Chibnall, “Introduction,” The World of Orderic Vitalis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Gransden, Historical Writing, 151–165.
Symeon of Durham, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, vol. 1, ed. John Hodgson Hinde, Surtees Society 51 (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1868);
Symeon of Durham, Symeonis monachi Opera omnia, ed. Thomas Arnold, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1882–1885). See also Gransden, Historical Writing, 148–151, and the collection of essays in Symeon of Durham, Historian of Durham and the North, ed. David Rollason (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, for the North-East England History Institute, 1998).
Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Greenway, “Introduction,” Historia Anglorum, cv–cvi.
See Ælred’s biography written, almost immediately following his death, by a close acquaintance: The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel, trans. F. M. Powicke (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). See also Marsha L. Dutton, “Ælred’s Historical Works: A Mirror for Twelfth-Century England,” in Ælred of Rievaulx: The Historical Works, trans. Jane Patricia Freeland, ed. and intro. Marsha L. Dutton (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2005), 1–37.
In general, see: Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 349–417;
Edward Augustus Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1867–1879), 1.251–79;
Pauline Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 69–82;
Judith Elaine Abbott, “Queens and Queenship in Anglo-Saxon England, 954–1066: Holy and Unholy Alliances” (PhD Diss., University of Connecticut, 1989), 286–331.
Gabriel Ronay asserts that she was a daughter of King Olaf of Sweden by his concubine Aedla of Vendland, but gives no reference. Gabriel Ronay, The Lost King of England: The East European Adventures of Edward the Exile (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 53.
DV, fo. 6ra; AR, Genealogia, PL 195: 733; John of Worcester, Chronicle, s.a. 1017. The second son, Edmund, might have been conflated with a non blood relative anglonormannische Übersetzung des 12. Jahrhunderts von Articuli Wilhelemi, Leges Eadwardi und Genealogia Normannorum, in Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 19 (1895): 77–84; Felix Liebermann, Uber die Leges Edwardi Confessoris (Halle: Niemeyer, 1896);
For Latin text, English translation, and analysis see Bruce R. O’Brien, ed. and trans., God’s Peace and King’s Peace: the Laws of Edward the Confessor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 158–203.
“St. Olaf’s Saga,” in Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, trans. Lee M. Hollander (Austin: University of Texas, 1964; repr. 2002), 342–343. See also Henrik Birnbaum, “Yaroslav’s Varangian Connection,” Scando-slavica 24 (1978): 5–25.
Jonathan Shepard, “Rus’,” in Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–1200, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 369–416.
Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 202.
Sturluson, Heimskringla, 578. See also H. R. Davidson, The Viking Road to Byzantium (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976) 158–173;
and Birnbaum, “Iaroslav’s Varangian Connection.” On the date of Elizabeth’s marriage see Manfred Hellmann and Wilhelm Schulz, Die Heiratspolitik Jaroslavs des Weisen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1962), 21.
For King Olaf II (also known as Olaf Haraldsson and St. Olaf), Magnus Olafsson (also known as “the Good”), and Harald Sigurdsson (also known as Hardräda), see Sturluson, Heimskringla, 486–516, 538–541, and 590–591. For the date of Harald’s marriage to Elizabeth, see Hellmann, “Die Heiratspolitik Jaroslavs des Weisen,” 21. For Andrew’s return and marriage, see Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum, Tomus I, Textus, ed. Elisabeth Galántai and Julius Kristó (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1985), 89–90.
For an earlier date of 1042/3, see John Carmi Parsons, “Edward the Ætheling’s Wife, Agatha,” The Plantagenet Connection 10, no. 1 and 2 (Summer/Winter 2002): 45.
DV, fo. 7ra and 7rb. This text is not in Ælred’s Genealogia. John of Fordun follows this account, citing Turgot as his source. John of Fordun, Johannis de Fordun Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871); trans. John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation (1872), trans. Felix J. H. Skene, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872), 5.15.
Eugen Horváth, “Anglo-Hungarian Connections in History” (Danubian Review / Danubian News) no. 5 (October, 1937): 25–32;
Ferenc Dőry, Szent István családi története [The Family History of St. Stephen], in Emlékkönyv Szent István király hálálanak kilencszázadik évfordulóján, ed. Jusztinián Serédi, 3 vols. (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Kiadása, 1938), 2.570–584;
Sándor Fest, The Sons of Eadmund Ironside, Anglo-Saxon King at the Court of Saint Stephen (Budapest: Archivum Europae centroorientalis, 1938);
and Sándor Fest, The Hungarian Origin of St. Margaret of Scotland (Debrecen: Department of English, Tisza István University of Sciences, 1940).
József Herzog, “Skóciai Szent Margit Származásának Kérdése” [The Problem of St Margaret of Scotland’s Scottish Origins], Turul 53 (1939): 1–42;
Szabolcs de Vajay, “Agatha, Mother of Saint Margaret Queen of Scotland,” Duquesne Review: A Journal of the Social Sciences 7, no. 2 (1962): 71–80.
This theory was endorsed by Gabriel Ronay and Alan Wilson, and by David Faris and Douglas Richardson in their article, “The Parents of Agatha, Wife of Edward the Exile,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 152 (1998): 224–235.
Szabolcs de Vajay further suggests that Mathilda, wife of Henry I of France, was another daughter of Liudolf, and therefore sister of Agatha in “Mathilde, reine de France inconnue,” Journal des savants 4, no. 4 (1971): 241–260.
For the marriage of Salomon to Judith, see Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum, Tomus I, Textus, 92 and commentary by Elemér Mályusz and Julio Kristó, Chronica Hungarorum, Tomus II, Commentarii (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), 333.
Emperor Henry was excommunicated by the pope in 1076 and again in 1080. He then retaliated by installing an anti-pope in 1080. Stefan Weinfurter, The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition, trans. Barbara M. Bowlus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); originally published as Herrschaft und Reich der Salier: Grundlinien einer Umbruchzeit (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1991), 144–153.
René Jetté, “Is the Mystery of the Origin of Agatha, Wife of Edward the Exile, Finally Solved?” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 150 (October 1996): 417–432.
Norman Ingham, “Has a Missing Daughter of laroslav Mudryi Been Found?” Russian History/Histoire Russe 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 242–244.
See Constance Brittain Bouchard, “Patterns of Women’s Names in Royal Lineages, Ninth-Eleventh Centuries,” Medieval Prosopography 9, no. 1 (1988): 1–32.
See William George Searle, Anglo-Saxon Bishops, Kings and Nobles: The Succession of the Bishops and the Pedigrees of the Kings and Nobles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899). Cnut’s sister was named Estrith, a Danish variant of Margaret, but the parallel hardly applies.
For her name and the unlikelihood that she was the mother of Jaroslav, see Andrzej Poppe, “Losers on Earth, Winners from Heaven. The Assassinations of Boris and Gleb in the Making of Eleventh-Century Rus’,” Questiones Medii Aevi Novae 8 (2003): 133–168; repr. Christian Russia in the Making, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), VII.137–143.
Lynda Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 527–1204 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), table 7.
Frances M. Mack, “Introduction,” Seinte Marherete be meiden ant martyr; re-edited from ms. Bodley 34, Oxford, and ms. Royal 17A XXVii, ed. Frances M. Mack, EETS o.s. 193 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), ix.
Ingham, “Has a Missing Daughter of Iaroslav Mudryi Been Found?” 216–223; Norman W. Ingham, “The Litany of Saints in ‘Molitva sv. Troice,’” Studies presented to Professor Roman Jakobson by his students (Cambridge, MA: Slavica Publishers, 1968), 121–136.
For the spread of Christian names in late antiquity, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 58.
György Györffy, Szent István király, East European Monographs, no. 403; trans. Peter Doherty, King Saint Stephen of Hungary (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 78;
Marie-Madeleine de Cevins, Saint Étienne de Hongrie (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2004), 112.
These examples are also cited by Alex Woolf in From Pictland to Alba 789–1070, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 258–259.
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© 2013 Catherine Keene
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Keene, C. (2013). A Noble and Unknowable Lineage. In: Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035646_2
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