Following the death of Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, her brother Edgar Ætheling was elected as King of England but never crowned.

Margaret was the daughter of the English prince Edward the Exile and his wife Agatha, and also the granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, King of England.

[1] After the death of Ironside in 1016, Canute sent the infant Edward and his brother to the court of the Swedish king, Olof Skötkonung, and they eventually made their way to Kievan Rus'.

[1] When Edward the Confessor died in January 1066, Harold Godwinson was selected as king, possibly because Edgar was considered too young.

[citation needed] Margaret's arrival in Scotland, after the failed revolt of the Northumbrian earls, has been heavily romanticised, though one medieval source suggested that she and Malcolm were first engaged nine years earlier.

[3] Conversely, Symeon of Durham implied that Margaret's first meeting with Malcolm III may not have been until 1070, after William the Conqueror's Harrying of the North.

Malcolm III was a widower, with two sons, Donald and Duncan, and would have been attracted to marrying one of the few remaining members of the House of Wessex, the Anglo-Saxon royal family.

Subsequently, Malcolm executed several invasions of Northumbria to support the claim of his new brother-in-law Edgar and to increase his own power.

"The chroniclers all agree in depicting Queen Margaret as a strong, pure, noble character, who had very great influence over her husband, and through him over Scottish history, especially in its ecclesiastical aspects.

Her religion, which was genuine and intense, was of the newest Roman style; and to her are attributed a number of reforms by which the Church [in] Scotland was considerably modified from the insular and primitive type which down to her time it had exhibited.

Among those expressly mentioned are a change in the manner of observing Lent, which thenceforward began as elsewhere on Ash Wednesday and not as previously on the following Monday, and the abolition of the old practice of observing Saturday (Sabbath), not Sunday, as the day of rest from labour (for more information on this issue see Skene's Celtic Scotland, book ii chap.

This apparently had considerable effect on Malcolm, who (with questions of bias) has been portrayed as illiterate: he so admired her piety that he had her books decorated in gold and silver.

[8] Margaret's husband, Malcolm, and their eldest son, Edward, were killed in the Battle of Alnwick against Robert de Mowbray, the Norman Earl of Northumbria, on 13 November 1093.

The remains of Margaret and Malcolm were removed by the Abbot of Dunfermline, George Durie, to safeguard them from protestant reformers; initially they went to his rural estate at Craigluscar.

In 1560, Mary, Queen of Scots had Margaret's head removed to Edinburgh Castle as a relic to assist her in childbirth.

[12] Pope Innocent IV canonised Margaret in 1250 in recognition of her personal holiness, fidelity to the Roman Catholic Church, work for ecclesiastical reform, and charity.

[13] In 1693 Pope Innocent XII moved her feast day to 10 June in recognition of the birthdate of the son of James VII of Scotland and II of England.