The legacy of Malcolm and Margaret

The conventional view of Malcolm's reign rests heavily on the influence wrought on the king by his second wife. With Margaret, the subject of the first 'official' biography of a Scottish monarch which was written by her confessor Turgot, the difficulty is to separate cult - indeed two cults - from contemporary reality. Shortly after her arrival a small Romanesque church was built at Dunfermline, the royal residence where she and Malcolm were married, and three Benedictine monks were sent at her request from the great mother house at Canterbury to form the nucleus of a Benedictine priory. It was a modest but nonetheless important first step, though in a direction which was not followed to any extent in Scotland. The beginnings of the huge, austere building (which still survives) are to be traced to its refoundation in 1128 in the reign of her youngest son, David. Yet the expansion of European monasticism, which so distinguished twelfth-century Scotland, drew not on the Benedictine impulse but on other religious orders - most notably the Augustinians or the Cistercians and Tironensians, both reformed Benedictine orders. The Life written by Turgot some twenty years after her death, touches on Dunfermline only briefly, as one of the many venues illustrating the faith and works of a deeply pious woman. Dedicated since her childhood - spent in recently converted Hungary - to 'a life of soberness' and meditation 'day and night upon the law of the Lord', her personal devotions found outlets in a renewed royal cult of St Andrew and in the patronage of eremitic monks of Loch Leven as well as in Dunfermline. Turgot describes how she supported twenty-four poor people all year round, ministered daily to nine abandoned young orphans and washed the feet of six of the poor during the seasons of Lent and Advent and had 300 more fed in the royal hall before herself.