Why might this have been so? David, it rightly has been claimed, was a legend in his own lifetime. But the makers of the legend were his own clerks or (mostly English) chroniclers. Few living legends are wholly popular with their own contemporaries. By normal measures of history, a King who led what was one of the largest Scottish armies ever to invade England to shattering defeat at the Battle of the Standard in 1138 or who had to contend with four risings - in 1124, 1130, 1134 and 1151 -.and whose death provoked a fifth, in 1153-4, met with only mixed success. Most of these revolts were not only provincial rebellions but were linked to a disputed succession -a spectre which haunted the macMalcolm dynasty until at least the 1210s.

The turning-point of the twelfth century, which left both a minor to succeed and fatally flawed David's legacy of a southern empire, was the death in 1152 of Henry, the only one of David's children to survive into adulthood. As a result, David, like Henry I of England, left an uncertain succession - despite his efforts in the last months of his life to have his elder grandson, the eleven-year-old Malcolm, acknowledged as his heir. David in a sense left not one minor but two, for the heir to the strategically important earldom of Northumbria which Henry had held was Malcolm's younger brother, William. Although Cumbria had remained in Scots hands after 1138, the reality was that David's southern pale was a product of the multifold but temporary crisis of the Anglo-Norman monarchy in the 1130s rather than a feat of arms. By 1157 it was gone and the border was settled on the line of Solway and Tweed. The almost inevitable loss of the earldom of Northumbria only four years after David's death left a bitter legacy which kings of Scots still strove to recoup more than half a century later. It was not until the reign of Alexander II that Anglo-Scottish relations were fully restored to an even keel or that serious internal challenges to the house of macMalcolm came to an end.

The short reign of Malcolm IV (1153-65) and the very long reign of his brother William I (1165-1214) - the longest before that of James VI - saw the same paradoxical mixture as before, of a consolidation of both kingdom and dynasty set against revolts of the provinces and a disputed succession. It was in Malcolm's reign that the phrases 'kingdom of Scots' or 'kingdom of Scotland' were first used by the king's scribes in charters. The process of the emergence of a single kingdom out of a single kingship was beginning to gather momentum.41 Yet it would not be until the late 1170s that a start was made to the long and difficult process of subduing the north and the winning of the west began in a serious vein only in the 1240s. William I was the first King of Scots to tackle disorder in Moray or Ross but his intermittent successes there were consolidated only in the reign of his son. Despite the efforts of Alexander II, the first of the macMalcolm dynasty to try to bring either the western mainland or the Isles into the control of the Scottish crown, it was not until the 1260s that much progress was made.