The youngest son of King Malcolm III and Queen Margaret, David spent most of his childhood in Scotland but was exiled to England temporarily in 1093.

[19] According to Richard Oram, it was only in 1113, when Henry returned to England from Normandy, that David was at last in a position to claim his inheritance in southern Scotland.

Moreover, Matilda's father Waltheof had been Earl of Northumberland, a defunct lordship which had covered the far north of England and included Cumberland and Westmorland, Northumberland-proper, as well as overlordship of the bishopric of Durham.

[35] In either April or May of the same year, David was crowned King of Scotland (Old Irish: rí(gh) Alban; Medieval Latin: rex Scottorum)[36] at Scone.

[39] Outside his Cumbrian principality and the southern fringe of Scotland-proper, David exercised little power in the 1120s, and in the words of Richard Oram, was "king of Scots in little more than name".

[49] Since modern historians no longer confuse him with "Malcolm MacHeth", it is clear that nothing more is ever heard of Máel Coluim mac Alaxandair, except perhaps that his sons were later allied with Somerled.

[54] While fighting King Stephen and attempting to dominate northern England in the years following 1136, David was continuing his drive for control of the far north of Scotland.

In 1139, his cousin, the five-year-old Harald Maddadsson, was given the title of "Earl" and half the lands of the earldom of Orkney, in addition to Scottish Caithness.

[55] Sometime before 1146, David appointed a native Scot called Aindréas to be the first Bishop of Caithness, a bishopric which was based at Halkirk, near Thurso, in an area which was ethnically Scandinavian.

In 1151, King Eystein II of Norway put a spanner in the works by sailing through the waterways of Orkney with a large fleet and catching the young Harald unaware in his residence at Thurso.

[59] His hostility to Stephen can be interpreted as an effort to uphold the intended inheritance of Henry I, the succession of his daughter and David's niece Empress Matilda.

[63] Before December was over, David marched into northern England, and by the end of January, he had occupied the castles of Carlisle, Wark, Alnwick, Norham and Newcastle.

Stephen also gave the rather worthless but for David face-saving promise that if he ever chose to resurrect the defunct earldom of Northumberland, Henry would be given first consideration.

Richard of Hexham called it "an execrable army, savager than any race of heathen yielding honour to neither God nor man" and that it "harried the whole province and slaughtered everywhere folk of either sex, of every age and condition, destroying, pillaging and burning the vills, churches and houses".

In the summer David split his army into two forces, sending William fitz Duncan to march into Lancashire, where he harried Furness and Craven.

In either May or June, David travelled to the south of England and entered Matilda's company; he was present for her expected coronation at Westminster Abbey, though this never took place.

David's acquisition of the mines at Alston on the South Tyne enabled him to begin minting the Kingdom of Scotland's first silver coinage.

Despite controlling the town of Durham, David's only hope of ensuring his election and consecration was gaining the support of the papal legate, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and brother of King Stephen.

For Oram, this event was the turning point, "the chance to radically redraw the political map of the British Isles [had been] lost forever".

[82] David was at least partly responsible for forcing semi-monastic "bishoprics" like Brechin, Dunkeld, Mortlach (Aberdeen) and Dunblane to become fully episcopal and firmly integrated into a national diocesan system.

[87] The problem was that this archepiscopal status had not been cleared with the papacy, opening the way for English archbishops to claim the overlordship of the whole Scottish church.

Much that was written was either directly transcribed from the earlier medieval chronicles themselves or was modelled closely upon them, even in the significant works of John of Fordun, Andrew Wyntoun and Walter Bower.

This quotation extends to over twenty pages in the modern edition and exerted a great deal of influence over what became the traditional view of David in later works about Scottish history.

[107] The ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism had elevated the role of races and "ethnic packages" into mainstream history, and in this context David was portrayed as hostile to the native Scots, and his reforms were seen in the light of natural, perhaps even justified, civilised Teutonic aggression towards the backward Celts.

The central idea is that from the late 10th century onwards the culture and institutions of the old Carolingian heartlands in northern France and western Germany were spreading to outlying areas, creating a more recognisable "Europe".

[116] The widespread enfeoffment of foreign knights and the processes by which land ownership was converted from customary tenures into feudal, or otherwise legally-defined relationships, would revolutionise the way the Kingdom of Scotland was governed, as did the dispersal and installation of royal agents in the new mottes that were proliferating throughout the realm to staff newly created sheriffdoms and judiciaries for the twin purposes of law enforcement and taxation, bringing Scotland further into the "continental" model.

[118] David established large-scale feudal lordships in the west of his Cumbrian principality for the leading members of the French military entourage who kept him in power.

During his reign, royal sheriffs were established in the king's core personal territories; namely, in rough chronological order, at Roxburgh, Scone, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Stirling and Perth.

[121] The revenue of his English earldom and the proceeds of the silver mines at Alston allowed David to produce Scotland's first coinage.

While they could not, at first, have amounted to much more than the nucleus of an immigrant merchant class, nothing would do more to reshape the long-term economic and ethnic shape of Scotland than the burgh.