The Lives of the Saints Volume 1 - St. Patrick's Basilica

www.freecatholicebooks.com
translation to Chester. These relics being scattered in the reign of
Henry VIII., her shrine was converted into the episcopal throne in the
same church, and remains in that condition to this day. This monument is
of stone, ten feet high, embellished with thirty curious antique images
of kings of Mercia and other princes, ancestors or relations of this
saint. See Cooper's remarks on each.
Footnotes:
1. Some authors in Leland's Collectanea place her religious profession
after the death of her father; but our account is supported by the
authority of Bradshaw.
2. This noble lady, heiress of the great virtues of her royal father,
rebuilt, after the death of her husband, the churches and towns of
Stafford, Warwick, Tamworth, and Shrewsbury; and founded, besides
some others, the great abbey of St. Peter's in Gloucester, which
church she enriched with the relics of St. Oswalk, king and martyr,
and in which she herself was buried. See Bradshaw, Dugdale, Launden.
ST. MARGARET SURNAMED OF ENGLAND, V.
HER body is preserved entire, and resorted to with great devotion, in
the church of the Cistercian nuns of Seauve Benoite,[1] in the diocese
of Puy, is Velay, eight leagues from that city toward Lyons. The
brothers of Sainte Marthe, in the old edition of Gallia Christiana,[2]
and Dom Besunier, the Maurist monk,[3] confirm the tradition of the
place, that she was an English woman, and that her shrine is famous for
miracles. Yet her life in old French, (a manuscript copy of which is
preserved by the Jesuits of Clermont college, in Paris, with remarks of
F. Peter Francis Chifflet,) tells us that she was by birth a noble
Hungarian. Her mother, probably at least of English extraction, after
the death of her husband, took her with her on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem; and both led a very penitential religious life, first in that
city, and afterwards at Bethlehem. St. Margaret having buried her mother
in that country, made a pilgrimage to Montserrat, in Spain, and
afterwards to our Lady's, at Puy in Velay. Then she retired to the
Cistercian nunnery of Seauve Benoite,[4] where she happily ended her
mortal course in the twelfth century. See Gallia Christ. Nova in Dioec.
Aniciensi seu Podiensi, t. 2, p. 777.
Footnotes:
1. Sylva Benedicta.
2. Gallia Christ. vetus, t. 4, p. 828.
3. Recueil Hist. des Abbayes de France, t. 1, p. 314.
4. This St. Margarey perhaps never professed the Cistercian order. At
least Henriquez, in the annals of that order, speak only of one
Margaret, and English woman, whose brother Thomas was banished by