nt kind--for almost the first thing we hear
in the contemporary history written by her confessor Theodoric,
afterwards a monk at Durham, is of the workshops and rooms for
embroidery and all the arts which were established in Dunfermline,
presumably in the palace itself under Margaret's own eye, for the
beautifying of the great church which she founded there, and also no
doubt for her own house. Certain women of good birth were judged worthy
to share the Queen's work, and lived with her, it would seem, in a kind
of seclusion, seeing only such chosen visitors as Margaret brought with
her to cheer their labours, and forswearing all idle talk and frivolity.
The Queen had such austerity mingled with her graciousness and such
grace with her severity, says her monkish biographer, loving an
antithesis, that all feared and respected her presence. "Her life was
full of moderation and gentleness, her speech contained the very salt of
wisdom; even her silence was full of good thoughts."

This biographer--according to the conscientious and painstaking
investigations of the Bollandist Fathers, who examine in their careful
way all the guarantees and traditions of the manuscript with a jealousy
worthy of the most enlightened historians--is not Turgot, who is usually
credited with it, but Theodoric, a monk of Durham, who must have shared
with Turgot, at some period of his life, the office of spiritual
director and confidant to the Queen. It is curious that both these
writers should have passed from the northern Court to the community at
Durham, of which Turgot was prior and Theodoric a simple brother; yet
not so strange either, for Durham was largely patronised and enriched by
Margaret and her husband, their kingdom at this period reaching as far
south. Of Turgot's Life, which was presumably written in the vernacular,
there seems nothing existing; but that of Theodoric is very full, and
contains many details which set before us the life of the simple Court,
with its many labours and charities: the King full of reverence and
tender surprise and admiration of all his wife's perfections; the young
saint herself, sweet and bright in modest gravity amid a tumultuous
world little respectful of women, full of the excessive charity of the
age and of her race, and of those impulses of decoration and
embellishment which were slow to develop among the ruder difficulties of
the north. Theodoric himself must have been more or less of an artist,
for