Both the speed and extent of the transformation taking place in David's reign, in either its economic or its ecclesiastical forms, can be exaggerated. It is likely that the pace of the surge in overseas trade quickened more dramatically in the early thirteenth century rather than early in the twelfth. The appearance of the 'new' or 'great' customs on wool exports, which tied the revenue accruing to the crown more closely to the level of trading activity than the old 'custom and cain', came as late as the 1270s. The full impact of new ecclesiastical institutions arrived, it needs to be remembered, not with their foundation but their physical completion and even modest,sized religious houses took decades rather than years to build. Few if any of the large foundations of David's reign could have been completed in their final physical form before his death. The Church of St Mary of Melrose was dedicated in 1146, ten building seasons after an advance party of monks and laybrothers arrived, but it is unlikely that the nave and cloister were completed before 1160. When the Abbot of Rievaulx, head of the Cistercian order, visited his daughter house at Dundrennan in 1165, twenty-three years after its foundation, he was housed 'in a small dwelling [where] ... no part of the roof, not even the space of a couple of feet, was free from the penetration of the rain'. No religious house, either, was founded north of the Forth in the reign. David's notable patronage of religious orders was confined largely to the part of the kingdom which he had effectively controlled since 1113, as brother of Alexander 1. Like the Anglo-Norman penetration of society, the story of the spread of a 'new' economy and new religious orders is one which lasts for a century or more and owes as much to general European trends as it does to any one king, however charismatic.

A more extensive and perhaps more immediate impact on the kingdom as a whole was made by the development of a parish system. In 1100 it is likely that there were many local churches and that their number had increased markedly over the previous century as local landowners erected them on their estates. By 1200 Scotland was well on its way to completing the network of some 1,100 parishes which eventually covered much of the country. Built in stone, most parish kirks were largely the work, as a thirteenth-century church statute decreed, of the parishioners themselves. Often deliberately placed at a distance from any existing shrine, chapel or hermitage dedicated to an early saint, the parish kirks of twelfthcentury Scotland were the most widespread sign of a new departure for the Church.