By June 1215 the rising in the north which greeted the succession of the sixteen- year-old Alexander II (1214-49) had been quashed, significantly by a native lord, Farquhar macTaggart. By October the new King, as intent on the recovery of the lost territories in Northumbria as Malcolm III or David I before him, was besieging the Castle of Norham. In January 1216 King John staged a punitive raid into Lothian, burning the towns of Berwick, Roxburgh, Dunbar and Haddington, to force the 'fox cub' back into 'his lair'. Within weeks Alexander retaliated, in a tit- for-tat raid into Cumbria.

The first thirteen months of the reign had seen three themes which would persist throughout it and much of the next reign as well. Alexander II was able to draw upon support from a far wider range of his nobility than had his father. The tendency which one English chronicler had detected in Malcolm IV and William the Lion (whose mother was a Warenne) that they 'profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen, both in race and in manners, language and culture' was checked.51 Alexander II restored a more even balance between the two faces of Scottish kingship and in the difficult early years of his son's minority in the 1250s there was a conscious fostering of Gaelic culture and Celtic saints as part of a campaign to heighten a sense of national identity. By then Scotia had come to embrace the whole of the kingdom, south as well as north of the Forth and the term regnum Scotiae (kingdom of Scotland), which had featured in royal documents since the reign of Malcolm IV, had found real political meaning. The native earls, many by now hybrids themselves through intermarriage, were far more prominent at the court of Alexander II than at that of William the Lion. A new balance of power amongst the greater nobility was being forged, which also, inevitably, included a balance being struck between crown and magnates.