The Old English "Life of St Margaret" (Two Versions)

In 1222, the Council of Oxford added St Margaret of Antioch’s feast day to the liturgical calendar of medieval England. Margaret went on to become a hugely popular saint of the medieval period, primarily as a patron saint of childbirth. Numerous tokens including rings and birthing rolls survive featuring Margaret’s iconography, which most often depicted her as a young woman alongside (or bursting out of) a dragon. By the end of the thirteenth century, numerous vernacular copies of Margaret’s story circulated England in both verse and prose, most notably in the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus Voragine and in the early thirteenth-century productions of the Katherine Group.

Two versions of Margaret’s hagiography survive in Old English prose: one in the eleventh-century compilation of British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and the other in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 303, a mid-twelfth-century collection of Old English homilies. Evidence of a third copy survives only in the incipit and explicit of an otherwise destroyed text in the burnt London, British Library, Cotton Otho B. x.

[Image 1] Early depiction of St. Margaret (early twelfth century). © The British Library Board, MS Cotton Caligula A.VIII, fol. 98r.

The Corpus Christi manuscript in particular provides a fascinating insight into the last vestiges of an Old English prose tradition. Copied in the first half of the twelfth century in the Southeast of England, probably at Rochester, the compilation carries on a pre-Conquest homiletic tradition which has seen it connected in the scholarship of those such as Elaine Treharne and Donald Scragg to other, similar compilations including Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Bodley 340 and 342 and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MSS 162 and 198, although it is the latest of all of these. It features homilies written by Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950-c. 1010) alongside other homiletic and didactic material, and was most likely part of alternating sanctorale and temporale cycles.

The temporale is that cycle of the liturgical year which organizes the moveable feasts centred on Christ, including Lent, Easter and Christmas; the sanctorale cycle commemorates specific saints and holy days, usually on fixed days in the year. Although the first 44 folios are missing from the beginning of the manuscript, Elaine Treharne calculates that these missing folios would have been sufficient to contain a set of sanctorale texts for feasts from Advent to Easter, followed by temporale from Advent to the point at which the surviving collection begins. The life of St Margaret appears as part of the sanctorale texts, interpolated with three other anonymous texts for the feasts of the Invention of the Cross, Margaret, Giles and Nicholas. Rochester’s production of one of the latest extant manuscripts of Ælfric’s works, an early thirteenth-century adaptation of his homilies in London, BL, Cotton Vespasian A. xxii., suggests that this locale was, and remained, interested in vernacular saints’ lives like that of St Margaret, and in the works of Ælfric, with a dedication matched only by Worcester Cathedral in the work of the Tremulous Scribe.

The vernacular versions of Margaret’s life, translated from Greek and Latin traditions dating back to as early as the fifth century (although the earliest extant Greek text is from the ninth) circulated in hundreds of manuscripts. The story, broadly, begins with Margaret’s birth to non-Christian parents in Antioch and her fostering and baptism in the Christian faith by the text’s narrator Theotimus (some texts vary this, mentioning only a devoutly Christian nurse). Catching the attention of the local non-Christian Prefect Olibrius while tending sheep, when Margaret resists his overtures she is imprisoned and brutally tortured. Whilst Margaret is preserved from suffering by God’s miraculous intervention, her martyrdom eventually concludes with her beheading, and the foundation of her cult and shrine. Locals to Oxford may be interested in paying a visit to St Margaret’s well, which is dedicated to St Frideswide and forms part of the churchyard of Saint Margaret’s Church in the village of Binsey. The church itself dates back to the twelfth century – the same century during which the Corpus Christi St Margaret text was being copied and used in the South East of England.

A critical interlude in Margaret’s prison cell between torture sessions sees her visited by two demons. As the townspeople and Margaret’s foster-family watch through the cell window, Margaret is visited first by a demon in the shape of a dragon which tries to swallow her whole, and then by a black demon in a humanoid form. Margaret avoids being eaten by the draconic demon with the sign of the cross – in some versions of the legend using a physical cross – and wrestles the humanoid demon into submission, standing on his neck, interrogating him over his crimes against mankind, and then banishing him into the earth. The text concludes with Margaret’s martyrdom, her ascension to heaven, and elaboration of her relics’ miraculous powers of healing and protection for those with physical or mental disabilities, and women in childbirth. This latter association most likely stems from those versions of the story which described Margaret as bursting unharmed from the dragon’s stomach, as the passage appears in the Tiberius manuscript:

And mid þam þe heo þus gebæd hig to Crist, se draca sette his muþ ofer þære halgan fæmnan heofod and hi forswealh. Ac Cristes rodetacen, þe seo halga Margareta worhte innan þæs dracan innoþe, seo hine toslat on twægen dælas, and seo halgæ fæmna eode ut of þæs dracan innoþe ungewæmmed.

(And as she prayed in this way to Christ, the dragon set his mouth over that holy maiden’s head and swallowed her. But the sign of Christ’s cross, which the holy Margaret made in the dragon’s stomach, rent him into two parts, and the holy maiden came out from the dragon’s belly uninjured).

[Clayton and Magennis, ‘Cotton Tiberius A. iii., The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, p. 122.]

[Image 2] St. Margaret emerging from the dragon in an early English Book of Hours, c 1240. © The British Library Board, MS Add. 49999 (De Brailes Hours), fol. 29v.

There were some doctrinal concerns about the more supernatural elements of Margaret’s story, condemned in the tenth century by Symeon Metaphrastes as a malicious invention of those attempting to discredit the Christian faith. Margaret’s encounter with the dragon remained perhaps the most popular – and certainly the most recognisable – part of her story, however, and would be repeated and reworked in later Middle English prose and verse versions of Margaret’s hagiography.

Select bibliography

Digitised manuscripts

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 303 (Old English Homilies featuring St. Margaret)

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MSS 162 (Old English Homilies)

Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Bodley 340 (11 images from 35mm slides)

Editions

Clayton, Mary, and Hugh Magennis, eds. The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Criticism

Dresvina, Juliana. A Maid with a Dragon: The Cult of St Margaret of Antioch in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Heyes, Michael E. Margaret’s Monsters: Women, Identity, and the Life of St. Margaret in Medieval England (Abingdon: New York, 2020).

Magennis, Hugh. ‘“Listen Now All and Understand”: Adaptation of Hagiographical Material for Vernacular Audiences in the Old English Lives of St. Margaret’, Speculum 71 (1996), 27–42.

Proud, Joana Angela. Old English Prose Saints' Lives: Influences Upon Composition and Copying from the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries, (1999) University of Manchester, Ph.D. Dissertation, ProQuest Database, Publication No. 10833711.

Scragg, Donald. ‘Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 162’, in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage, ed. Philip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 71-84.

Spencer, Frederic. ‘The Legend of St. Margaret’, Modern Language Notes 4 (1889), 197-201.

Treharne, Elaine. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 303 and the Lives of Saints Margaret, Giles and Nicholas, (1992), University of Manchester, Ph. D. Dissertation, ProQuest Database, Publication No. 301529457.

Treharne, Elaine. ‘Reading from the Margins: The Uses of Homiletic Manuscripts in the Twelfth Century’, in Beatus Vir: Studies in Early English and Norse Manuscripts in Memory of Phillip Pulsiano, ed. A. N. Doane and K. Wolf (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), pp. 329-58.

Corinne Clark is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, funded by the Anne Hudson studentship at Somerville College. Her current research is on approaches to reading ‘sweetness’ in religious literature from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including the work of Walter Map, the Wooing Group and Robert Grosseteste. Corinne’s article ‘Old Places, New Wor(l)ds: The Scribe of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.5.48 and Place Names in Thomas of Erceldoune’ appeared in the Journal of the Early Book Society in 2023, and her chapter ‘Gasts and Gaps: Making Space for Souls in the Middle English Gast of Gy and an Illumination in MS Getty 31’ is forthcoming in Nottingham Medieval Studies, 69 (2025) in the collection on ‘Spirits and Spirituality’(ed. Eleni Ponirakis).