Series 1 > History of Greater Britain, as well England as Scotland

The holy mai
ried life of
Malcolm and
Margaret.
130 JOHN MAJOR’S HISTORY [book hi.
of religion, inasmuch as whereby a man sins thence too shall
come the penalty of sin. Of the holy place he made a profane
pleasance; but a great and public sin must needs be followed
by a condign punishment1.
CHAP. VIII.—Of the rest of the acts of Malcolm, king of the
Scots, and how the holy life of his wife brought him too to the practice
of piety.
In the one-and-thirtieth year of the reign of Malcolm
Canmore died William the bastard. Margaret, the wife of
Malcolm, being herself a most devout woman, made of this
sagacious and high-spirited king a man wholly religious; this
saintly woman made of him a saintly man. And it is no
wonder: for, as the royal psalmist sings, ‘ With the holy thou
wilt be holy ’. This woman was wont to be present daily at
five masses celebrated in succession, and the king at two or
three. They fed daily three hundred of the needy, and with
their own hands gave them to eat and drink. On each day in
Advent and in Lent the king was accustomed to wash the feet
of six poor persons, and the queen did the same by a far larger
number. He built the church of Durham, which the Britons
call Dura; he was at the time in possession of that part of the
country. The foundations of the building were laid by Turgot,
the admirable bishop of the see, by the convent, the prior, and
the king 2. He richly endowed too the church of Dunfermline.
But while Malcolm was besieging the fortalice of Alnwick, a
certain soldier brought to him the keys of the castle on the
point of a spear, and so put the king off his guard, and
1 Major thus attributes the formation of the New Forest to William Rufus,
not to William the Conqueror, and he is here in agreement with Caxton, who
adds, as to the manner of Rufus’s death, that ‘ it was no meruayle, for the daye
that he dyed he had let to ferme the archebysshopryche of Canterbury’.—
Chronicles, fol. Ixxvi. ed. 1528.
2 Turgot was prior (not bishop) from 1087. The bishop was William of St.
Carilef, who held the see from 1080 to 1099, but was for three years of that time
in exile. It is supposed that it was during his banishment in Normandy that he
conceived the design of rebuilding Durham Cathedral. That Malcolm was
present at the ceremony of the foundation seems very probable. Cf. Simeon
of Durham, in Twysden’s Scriptores Decent, col. 218.