In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries Scottish cathedrals had naturally turned to their English counterparts to provide a model for their organisation and constitutions: Moray, perhaps prompted by the example of its first effective bishop, Richard of Lincoln (1187-1203), looked to Lincoln Cathedral for its constitutions in 1212; Glasgow, however, had already adopted those of Salisbury, and Dunkeld followed suit in the 1250s. The influence of English diocesan reform on St Andrews did not come to a sudden end in 1238, for Bemham had been a member of Malvoisin's household and had modelled the development of a small group of professional administrators to run his diocese on the work of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. The Sarum use in worship, as a result, had gained widespread, if not complete acceptance by then." By 1250 a new breed of churchmen had emerged. Bishops were increasingly likely either to be royal servants or the kin or clients of noble families; the favour of Alexander III and the tentacles of Comyn patronage extended far into the benefice structure of the late thirteenth-century secular Church. The ecclesia Scoticana, as a result, was staffed largely by Scots by the reign of Alexander III.

The new reformed religious orders established in the course of the twelfth century - Augustinians, Cistercians and Premonstratensians - were all French in origin but had been introduced via daughter houses already set up in England. Only the Tironensians amongst the first generation of monastic incomers came directly from the mother house in France - at Tiron near Chartres. Whether the parentage was direct or indirect, there is an important truth in the saying that every Scottish monastery was 'a little bit of France'. Like Tironensian abbots, heads of Cistercian houses were obliged to attend the regular meetings of all abbots of the order, at Citeaux in Burgundy. In turn, it was the duty of abbots of mother houses in all orders to inspect daughter houses every year. The monastic world knew no frontiers, although few orders were as systematic in their contacts as the Cistercians, which by 1273 had no fewer than eleven houses ranging from Melrose in the Borders to Saddell in Argyll and Kinloss in Moray, each with at least thirteen monks and ten or more lay-brothers. Often granted large tracts of uncultivated land ideal for sheep farming, the Cistercians accounted for four of the fifteen religious houses which had warehouses in Scotland's premier port of Berwick in the thirteenth century; their organisation, which controlled perhaps as much as 5 per cent of the Scottish wool clip, allowed them to act as a virtual trading consortium.