Saint Margaret

Saint Margaret of Scotland, born around 1045 and died on November 16, 1093, was Queen of Alba from 1070 to 1093 as the wife of King Malcolm III. She was a member of the House of Wessex and was born in the Kingdom of Hungary to Edward the Exile, an expatriate English prince. Margaret returned with her family to England in 1057 after their exile. Following Harold Godwinson's death at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, she married Malcolm III by the end of that year. Margaret was a devout Christian and engaged in numerous charitable works, including establishing a ferry across the Firth of Forth for pilgrims traveling to St Andrews, which gave South Queensferry and North Queensferry their names. She was the mother of three kings of Scotland: Edgar, Alexander I, and David I, as well as Matilda of Scotland, queen consort of England. Margaret died at Edinburgh Castle in 1093, shortly after learning of her husband's and son's deaths in battle. In 1250, Pope Innocent IV canonised her, and her remains were reinterred in Dunfermline Abbey in Fife. Her relics were lost during the Scottish Reformation, but Mary, Queen of Scots once owned her head, which was later preserved by Jesuits at the Scots College in Douai, France, until it was lost during the French Revolution.