Agatha, her ancestry and the Dunfermline Life of St Margaret

by Keith Moore[1]

Abstract

The Life of St Margaret, queen of Scotland (d.1093) has been profitably used by generations of historians and biographers since the twelfth century. It has not, however, in its earliest and most widely published version had much to offer the genealogist, since it says little about Margaret’s paternal family and nothing about Agatha, her mother. That has now changed with the publication of a lengthier but so far little–known version of the Life, which, it will be argued, not only provides both early and valuable evidence for Agatha’s German connections but was a source of much material for Aelred of Rievaulx’s Genealogy of the Kings of the English.