10 - Queen Margaret and Dunfermline: Cult, Court and Community

Summary

ON 19 June 1250 the great and the good of the Scottish kingdom assembled at Dunfermline abbey. Their number included the king, Alexander III (1249–86), and his mother, Marie de Coucy (fl. c. 1218–85), who were accompanied by seven bishops, seven earls and several abbots and barons. At a distance, the townspeople of Dunfermline perhaps looked on. We will return to their interest in what unfolded later but the entire Scottish political and ecclesiastical establishment of its day had come to witness the second translation of the ‘bones and [Walter Bower added in the 1440s] the earthly remains’ of Margaret, the late eleventh-century queen and great-great-greatgrandmother of Alexander III. When her body was exhumed, the air was suddenly filled with such an intense and sweet-smelling fragrance that, it was said, ‘men thought that the entire sanctuary had been sprinkled with the fragrance of spices and the scents of flowers in full bloom’. Amidst musical accompaniment and singing Margaret's body was then carried to its new resting place; but as the cortege passed the burial plot of her husband, King Malcolm III (1058–93), the pallbearers found themselves paralysed and unable to move the deceased queen's remains any further. Utterly perplexed, they eventually heard a divinely inspired voice ‘which loudly proclaimed that it was perhaps not God's will that the bones of the holy queen be translated before her husband's tomb had been honoured in the same way’. Malcolm's bones were then raised, this releasing the invisible impediment to Margaret's progression; and king and queen could then be duly reinterred ‘in tombs which had been elegantly decked out’ for the occasion. There were two very clear reminders in this pageant that the audience was witnessing sanctity. Sweet fragrances were stock in trade for the exhumation of saintly bodies; and miraculous powers (such as the inability of the cortege to progress beyond Malcolm's body) were exactly what the devout population of the middle ages expected of its saints. Indeed, very similar phenomena had been reported in 1083 in Hungary, on the translation of King Stephen, to whom Margaret was perhaps related and in whose kingdom she had certainly spent much of her youth.