David was the first King of Scots to strike his own coinage and it was in his reign that the spread of the motte, symbol and reality of centralised authority of a more developed kind, began. By the end of his reign the foundations of a new type of sheriffdom, based largely on a model already founded by Norman kings of England, had been laid. The first surviving charter of the reign, made probably in 1124 and perhaps even at the time of the inauguration ceremony itself, was a grant of the huge lands of Annandale on the southwestern frontier to the Norman family, de Brus; all but one of the witnesses to it were also Norman knights. As new agents of a traditional policy recruited at the personal invitation of David, families such as the Bruces, Stewarts and Morvilles (to give their names a familiar spelling), often in origin obscure under, tenants of David's English estates or even landless knights, were in a real sense the king's own probi homines ('worthy men'). It was the age of the arriviste.

The two most novel aspects of the 'Davidian revolution' were the royal burghs and the new religious orders. Towns or some form of urban settlements must have existed before 1100 but at least a dozen or perhaps as many as sixteen were given the status of a king's burgh in the reign; they included Berwick, Perth and Aberdeen, focal points for the surge in overseas trade which marked the twelfth century throughout much of western Europe. In 1124 there had been monasteries only at Dunfermline, Scone and Selkirk. In 1128 the Benedictine foundation at Dunfermline was elevated from a priory to an abbey and work on the nave of the present abbey church, so reminiscent of Durham Cathedral, probably began. Further Augustinian houses were founded beside Edinburgh (at Holyrood), near Stirling (at Cambuskenneth) and at jedburgh and St Andrews, all, like Scone, established royal centres. The patterns laid down in the time of Margaret and Alexander I were extended and fulfilled.

It was David's own patronage of three other, recently founded orders which best indicated the distinctive patronage given by the royal house to Scottish monasticism. The first abbey of the order of Tiron had been founded in northern France in 1109, only four years before the establishment of its house at Selkirk; by 1153, by which time this original house had been moved to Kelso beside the important royal centre of Roxburgh, another house had been founded at Lesmahagow, near Glasgow, and five more would follow before 1286. Two other reformed Benedictine orders - the Cistercians and Premonstratensians - also brought the new spiritual vitality of a stricter and purified Augustinianism. The white canons, first founded at Pr6montr6 in north-eastern France in 1119, were granted a foundation at Dryburgh in 1150, and five more houses would follow by the 1220s. The most generous grants, however, were made to the white monks of the Cistercian order, founded at Citeaux in Burgundy in 1098; Melrose was the first, founded as a daughter house of Rievaulx in Yorkshire (itself only four years old) in 1136 and Dundrennan, which has been described as the outstanding Scottish example of the all-embracing austerity of Cistercian architecture, followed some six years later. By the end of the reign four of the eleven eventual Cistercian houses had been established.