Come Celebrate!

Biographical details are reproduced, with permission, from Exciting Holiness, Canterbury Press, unless otherwise credited.

St Margaret of Scotland, Queen
(16 November)
Born in the year 1046, St Margaret was the
daughter of the Anglo-Saxon royal house of
England but educated in Hungary, where
her family lived in exile during the reign of
the Danish kings in England. After the Norman
invasion in 1066, when her royal person
was still a threat to the new regime, she
was welcomed in the royal court of Malcolm
III of Scotland and soon afterwards
married him in 1069. Theirs was a happy
and fruitful union and Margaret proved to
be both a civilising and a holy presence.
She instituted many church reforms and
founded many monasteries, churches and
pilgrim hostels. She was a woman of prayer
as well as good works who seemed to influence
for good all with whom she came into
contact. She died on this day in the year
1093.

St Hugh of Lincoln, Bishop
(17 November)
A Burgundian by birth, St Hugh became a
monk at the Carthusian Grande Chartreuse
in 1165 at the age of twenty-five. In about
1175, he was invited by the English King,
Henry II, to become prior of his Charterhouse
foundation at Witham in Somerset,
badly in need of reform even though it had
been only recently founded. In 1186, St
Hugh was persuaded to accept the See of
Lincoln, then the largest diocese in the
land. He brought enormous energy to his
diocese in every aspect of its life, combining
with his building, reforming and administrative
skills very real pastoral gifts and
deep compassion. He managed to defend
the rights of the Church without making an
enemy of the king – something St Thomas a
Becket failed to do. He died in London on
this day in the year 1200.

St Fergus, Bishop (18 November)
There are a number of dedications in the
Pictish lands of Caithness, Buchan and Angus
recording the missionary work of St
Fergus in the north of Scotland. The three
churches he founded in Strathearn are all
dedicated to St Patrick. He is generally
identified with a Pictish bishop who attended
a Council at Rome in the year 721.
He was the patron saint of the burgh of
Wick, and the Aberdeenshire village of St
Fergus is probably the site of the small settlement
from which his mission radiated.

St Andrew, Apostle,
Patron of Scotland (30 November)
Though St Andrew is named among the
apostles in the synoptic gospels, it is in St
John’s gospel that most is learned about
him. St Andrew was a Galilean fisherman,
a follower of John the Baptist when Jesus
called him to follow Him. He then went to
find his brother Simon Peter and brought
him to Jesus. St Andrew became one of the
inner circle of disciples that included his
brother and the other pair of brothers,
James and John. Together they witnessed
all the major events of our Lord’s ministry.
After Pentecost, tradition has St Andrew
travelling on several missionary journeys
and eventually being martyred by being
crucified on an x-shaped cross. He became
patron saint of Scotland because of a legend
that his relics had been miraculously
brought here in the eighth century.