In one sense, the 1090s marked a severe crisis of the MacMalcolm succession. It was resolved only by a combination of the most predictable twist in the dangerous game of power politics which Malcolm had been playing throughout much of his reign-the descent of Scotland into a client state of England - and the least likely of dynastic scenarios - the succession, one after another, of Malcolm's three youngest sons by Margaret. In another sense, each episode in the complex wranglings between 1093 and 1099 represented some effort to reconcile the clash of the two Cultures which permeated the royal house and its court. Duncan II had been accepted only 'on condition that he should never again introduce English or French into the land'. Edgar made no such promise. Yet even he, described as being 'like in all things' to Edward the Confessor (who was his mother's great uncle) and often taken as the very model of a Scoto-Norman king, was careful to establish his main residence not in Lothian but in Scotia, at Invergowrie on Tay.

There are dangers, too, in the pursuit of history as the cult of personality. The differences between Malcolm and Margaret are sometimes taken as a convenient symbol of the clash between 'a man who held back time by his own existence' and a woman who consciously instigated changes 'of fundamental, far-reaching significance'. It is too easy to describe the reign as a struggle between yesterday's man and tomorrow's woman. Only a long elapse of time and a calculated rewriting of history in the thirteenth century, when Margaret was elevated to a new stature, gave history to the 'progressives'. Similarly, the history of late eleventh- and twelfth-century Scotland cannot be told as a one-way traffic of the 'Normanisation' of native institutions, law and culture. Influences moved in both directions. Two dynamic cultures, Celtic and Anglo-Norman, were becoming increasingly intermingled (and therefore more difficult to distinguish) during an age of rapid change. It is, in a sense, the story of the ninth century repeated, with different actors: Scottish society, like kingship itself, was a crucible. Each reign in the 150 years which separated the reigns of Edgar and Alexander III represented a different attempt to strike a balance between old and new.