As in the Church, the 'feudalisation' of society was piecemeal and variable, a working compromise rather than a feudal formula. It was only in some parts of Scotland south of the Forth that the characteristic Norman establishment of castle, town and monastery at or near the caput of a feudal honour took place. Nine sheriffdoms seem to have been established by 1153, five of them in Scotia, but only three had a castle attached. Of the sixteen likely burgh foundations of the reign, six were north of the Forth, but the bulk of them were on or near the east coast, positioned for access to the lucrative North Sea trade routes rather than placed for effect as a symbol of feudal power. 37 The different layers of the wider process of feudalisation - of not only the knight's fee and homage or the development of the sheriffdom but also grants to religious houses and the burgh charter - were all at work in David's reign, but they did not always coincide. Much of the work begun in David's remarkable reign needed at least another fifty years and the next two reigns to consolidate. The model followed by David I was not that of William the Conqueror, whose whole reign has been described as a period of experimentation, but of his own patron and mentor Henry 1, who pursued a more subtle balance of power, through the adroit use of marriages, enfeoffments and patronage of offices in both church and state which favoured old families as well as new. In Henry I's England, as in David's Scotland, the policy of Norman settlement was at its most radical on the frontier between the two kingdoms. But there was a vital difference: in England this- was consolidation and conciliation after three decades of conquest politics; in Scotland it was a cautious first step in only one part of the kingdom. The only area where a 'conquest' took place in David's Scotland was in Moray, after the defeat in 1130 of a rising led by Angus, grandson of Lulach.

The balance of old and new was not only to do with the skilful manipulation of men and resources; it was at root about the nature of kingly power. Three hundred years later, James I would bemoan the grants of a king he saw as (a sair [costly] sanct for the crown'. But a revitalised Church was not seen in the same way in the twelfth century as it would be in the fifteenth: far from it being a drain on the limited resources of the crown, it was a vital instrument of royal policy. New monasteries helped to anchor new families and strengthen their hold on their estates. Bishops and monks were the frontiersmen of twelfth-century Scotland, helping to advance royal authority in regions of uncertain allegiance. Yet the seats of David I's bishops were almost all in long-established ecclesiastical centres. The sword and orb which the enthroned David held in the Kelso Abbey seal were symbolic of a new royal authority, which, as the English chronicler Orderic Vitalis claimed, exalted him above his predecessors. This was also, however, the very sword of his ancestors used at his inauguration and symbolic of the fact that the accepted means of securing the royal line was by paying respect to the existing norms of kingmaking. David, it was reported, was chary of some of the old rites of inauguration in 1124; but by the 1150s he was willing to turn to MacDuff, Earl of Fife and accepted leader of the old native nobility, to secure the acceptance of his young successor as rex desigriatus. 39 In one sense, the Annandale charter granted in the first year of David's reign symbolised the feudalisation of the southern part of the kingdom of David fitz Malcolm; in another, it demonstrated the obsession of David macmalcolm, like his father before him, with the recovery of Cumbria. The expedition into the north of England in 1138 brought together the two faces of David I: it was at once a repayment of fealty owed to Maud, the deposed daughter of his liege lord Henry I, and a consolidation of his recent acquisition of Cumbria, the forward base of a King of Scots whose ambitions to create a huge pale north of the Tees belonged as much to the tenth or eleventh centuries as to the twelfth. The longer the reign went on, the more it might be claimed that David had become a Celtic king,