David I of Scotland
David I of Scotland was the youngest son of Malcolm Canmore and Saint Margaret, brought up at the court of Henry I of England, whose sister he married into, and in twenty-nine years as king he gave Scotland its burghs, its coinage, its sheriffs, its Norman baronage, most of its great abbeys and its first bishoprics with fixed sees, and used the English civil war to push his border south to the Tees; a king three centuries later said he had been a sore saint for the crown, meaning that the church had got too much. He was an English magnate before he was a king. Henry I made him Earl of Huntingdon by marriage in 1113 and gave him southern Scotland, Cumbria and Lothian, to hold under his brother Alexander, and when Alexander died in 1124 he took the throne with Anglo-Norman knights behind him. The men he settled in Scotland were his English friends and their sons: Bruces in Annandale, Stewarts in Renfrew, Morvilles, Somervilles, Lindsays, holding by charter for knight service, and the Gaelic earls of the north rose against the new order twice and were beaten. He founded or refounded Kelso, Melrose, Jedburgh, Holyrood, Dryburgh, Newbattle and Dunfermline, and the bishoprics of Glasgow, Dunblane, Brechin, Caithness, Ross and Aberdeen date from him. He made burghs with trading rights at Edinburgh, Berwick, Roxburgh, Stirling, Perth and Aberdeen, settled Flemings and English in them, and struck the first Scottish silver pennies from the silver of the Alston mines he had taken. When Stephen took the English throne in 1135 David, who had sworn to support Matilda, invaded Northumbria on her behalf and his own, and his army of Galwegians and Scots was cut to pieces at the Battle of the Standard near Northallerton in August 1138. The peace nonetheless gave his son Northumberland and himself Cumberland, and he held court at Carlisle and Newcastle for the rest of his reign. His only son died in 1152. He died at Carlisle in May 1153, praying, Ailred of Rievaulx says, and was succeeded by a grandson of eleven.
- Lived: 1084 CE – 1153 CE
- Nationality: Scottish
- Roles: king, monarch
