Kingfinding fever spreads to Scotland

This Glasgow Herald article illustrates how historian Sheila Pitcairn wishes to search Dunfermline Abbey and identify Malcolm III and his family. Robert I (le Brus) can easily be found there already.

The widowed Malcolm III married (St.) Margaret of Wessex, great-niece of Edward the Confessor and granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, in about 1070, allowing Anglo-Saxon royal blood to pass into the Scottish monarchy and then the English Plantagenets via their daughter Edith who married Henry I. St. Margaret is also among the lost members of the House of Dunkeld thought to be buried at the Abbey, together with their offspring: Edward (killed with Malcolm fighting the Normans at Alnwick), Edmund (a co-ruler) and Ethelred (Abbot of Dunkeld), Edgar, Alexander I and David I (three of the kings who reigned after Malcolm) and their grandson Malcolm IV (David I’s son).

Exhumers would also expect to find Donald III (Malcolm III’s brother) and Alexander I’s wife Sybilla although some parts of Malcolm and St. Margaret may have been in Edinburgh Castle, the Scots College at Douai in France or the Escorial in Madrid. They may have been lost due to later events.