St. Margaret of Scotland, today's saint

Haggis and Goulash

Today on the church calendar is set aside in honor of St. Margaret of Scotland, who wasn't really Scottish. She's quite a lady. She was actually a curious mix of Saxon and Hungarian, and only Scottish by marriage. Not only that, but she was related to Bl. Gisele, the wife of St. Stephen, the Apostolic King of Hungary, and her uncle was St. Edward the Confessor. She ended up married to Malcolm III of Scotland, whose previous wife had been named Ingibjorg for some reason.

In addition to the standard pious prayer life and various other Catholic queenly thingies, she also gave great support to the Faith in her adopted country, founded monasteries and churches left and right and also managed to get her jeweled gospel book dropped into a river. It was miraculously recovered undamaged, though the English stole it and stuck it in some cupboard at the Bodeleian Library. Typical.

She helped introduce continental fashion and manners, English-style parliaments, feudalism, Benedictines and foreign merchants into Scotland. Not too shabby, and on top of that, her youngest son, David, was made a saint as well. She also foretold the day of her death, this day in 1093, four days after those of her husband and one of her sons. Her life was written by Turgot of Durham or the monk Theodoric, who is described, perhaps as an understatement, as "somewhat obscure." Rather more mystifying is that her chapel in Edinburgh Castle was at one time, technically speaking, part of Nova Scotia. You know, the one in Canada.

A relic of her head was kept by the Jesuits at Douai, where it got trashed during the French Revolution. It seems the rest of her (and her husband, Malcolm) ended up in an urn in the Escorial, though when Bishop Gillies of Edinburgh asked for them back, nobody in Spain could remember where they'd put them only four hundred years earlier.

Anyway, check out her biography here and also here, and don't forget to ask for her prayers today, even if the feast is occulted by the celebration of Sunday. And if any of you people get some nutty idea about tossing the caber around, well, on your head be it.