Many of the new earls were indeed old mormaers under a new guise. The mormaers of Fife were probably the most senior noble family in Scotland before and after 1100; they claimed the privilege of the enthronement of Malcolm III in 1058 and of Alexander III in 1249. Duncan I (c. 1133-54), created Earl of Fife in 1136, was the first native Scot to have his existing territory and lordship regranted in feudal terms. He and his son, Duncan II (1154-1204), were the most prominent of the Celtic aristocracy who turned 'feudal' in the twelfth century, as shown by the frequency and the prominence of their names among the witnesses on royal charters, but they were otherwise typical of a class of Celtic great lords like the earls of Lennox or Stratheam. In the first two vital feudal centuries, two seemingly contradictory processes were going on at the same time. Ancient native lords were happily assuming the full panoply of new-style military feudalism; but the newcomers, whether French, Flemish or Anglo-Norman, were also rapidly being absorbed by native society, which of course varied in its racial make-up. As late as the fifteenth century earls of Lennox were also known as mormaers.

It may be useful to remember the different experiences of feudalism in Wales and Ireland. In the case of Wales, Norman lords took over ancient jurisdictions and territories but 'preserved or adopted or mangled them as occasion required' . This was how feudal colonisation should have worked and it may well have done so in Lothian and in many parts of eastern Scotland north of the Forth. In Ireland, by contrast, a gap had begun to open up by the middle of the thirteenth century between the foreign colonists who retained lands and interests on both sides of the Irish Sea and those who were settlers proper; the latter, who would in course of time come to be known by a revealing confusion of names including the Old English and the English-Irish, often became more Gaelicised than the Gaels themselves, thereby blurring distinctions between colonial loyalties and native power. Scotland's equivalent of the Irish Sea was the still formidable barrier of the Forth, but a different, linguistic frontier was beginning to supplant it by the fourteenth century - the so-called 'Highland line', increasingly separating Gaelic culture from that of the rest of Scotland. Although some great noble families (most notably the Campbells) bridged that linguistic divide, most lords in Celtic Scotland, whether descended from settlers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries or from older native kindred, chose to consolidate their sense of separateness. The feudal adventurers, far from creating a homogeneous noble class, picked their separate, highly localised paths through the history of medieval Scotland - and nothing is more significant for its history.