David, youngest son of Malcolm and Margaret, would have been the son least exposed to his mother's influence for he was probably only about nine when both his parents died. The whole of his adolescence was spent at the English court and after his sister's marriage to Henry I in 1100 he became a member of the royal household, witnessing royal acts as 'David, the Queen's brother'. As late as the 1130s, David was still, to English chroniclers, the epitome of Norman knighthood, which was why his expedition into England in 1138 at the head of an'incredible army'of semibarbarous peoples was so shocking to them. 23 Even after the death of Edgar, it would have seemed unlikely that he would succeed to the Scottish throne for Alexander, unlike Edgar, had married and was still in his thirties. In 1114 David married a widow some years older than himself, a ward of the King, securing for himself the extensive earldoms of Huntingdon and Northampton. It was the marriage of a favoured client rather than of an heir apparent, for Maud was already about forty and could not have been relied on to produce children.

David has been called one of Henry I's 'new men', his dependents and colonisers of the north. It was at Henry's insistence that David was granted land and power in southern Scotland by 1113. It was there, as Henry's virtual viceroy in the north, that well before 1124 the characteristic, overlapping layers of Anglo-Norman settlement which would mark his reign as King of Scots were already being planted: a mixed group of Anglo-Norman adventurers settled in Northumbria, which had seen the last of its native rebellions a generation before, but in the more difficult west country of Cumbria a much tighter-knit band of knights, drawn mostly from Lower Normandy and Brittany, was deployed; and at Selkirk an outpost of the austere monks of Tiron was established in 1113. 26 The balance between the two Davids - David fitz Malcolm, client and marcher lord of Henry I of England, and David macmalcolm, younger brother of the King of Scots enjoying something like the customary jurisdiction in Lothian which both his father and his brother Alexander had held before him - was as yet firmly tilted towards the feudal.

In 1124 David (1124-53) succeeded on the death of Alexander 1. The most unexpected aspect of his reign was probably its length. Already in middle age and older than both his elder brothers when they had come to the throne, few could have expected David to have reigned for almost three decades or to have governed with a vigour which lasted until his final days. The seat of a charter made to Kelso Abbey by his successor in 1159 shows a grey,haired, long-bearded patriarchal figure, yet it unmistakably represents a king who still holds a sword, the traditional symbol of kingly power, upright in his right hand and an orb, a novel emblem of the sacred nature of kingship, firmly grasped in his left. Much of the imagery on the Kelso seal was innovative, copied from Capetian kings of France, and kingship itself, it has been said , moved 'into a new epoch' in David's reign.