succession set the stage in the eleventh century for a north-south dichotomy in the new kingdom, which by this time had incorporated both Beornicia (Malcolm II) and Strathclyde (Duncan I). The politics of the period reflect the ambitions of the Cineal Loairn, for as they had traditionally alternated the old high-kingship of Dal Riada with the Cineal nGabrain, the line which had inherited the Pictish throne, they wished to reassert their ancient rights. Yet even such Dalriadic awarenesses as these were tempered by the new Picto-Gaelic style succession, for the seriousness of the claim of the Cineal Loairn depended on key marriages with factions within the Cineal nGabrain itself during the eleventh century. There may also be in this a reflection of the more ancient division of the Pictish kingdom itself into northern and southern parts, for the Cineal Loairn had migrated northward up the Great Glen into Moray, and intermarried with Northern Picts.

St. Margaret, the mother of David I, sought to influence the Celtic church in the North to come into conformity with the Roman church, as the Saxon church had done. It is not surprising that under her influence the kings of her line should revive the Church of St. Andrew in Fife from the grass-roots level, especially since the rival dynasty and revolting tribes of the time were closely connected with the Kindred of St. Columba (they mainly held sway in the north and west of the country—Moray and Argyle—where, as we have said, the more purely Gaelic, as opposed to Pictish, tribal aristocracies were strongest).

While David I and his descendants were attempting to consolidate the kingdoms of Albany (Picts and Scots), Lothian and Cumbria (Strathclyde) into the Kingdom of Scots after 1124, their chief rivals for power descended from David’s brothers: the MacWilliam claimants from his half-brother Duncan II (derived from Malcolm Ill’s first wife), and the Moray dynasty from his full-brother Aethelred, last abbot of the Columban church center of Dunkeld, who married the Moray "Highland") heiress. Aethelred was, like David 1, of the Kindred of St. Columba, and the interesting thing here is that all of the claimants of this time descended from royal heiresses of around 1000: As we have seen, the early Moray dynastic line, associated with Macbeth, whose representative married the heiress of Clan Duff and about 1000, itself passed to an heiress who married Aethelred. Meanwhile David and his brothers were descendants of Crinan, their paternal great-grandfather (d. 1045), who was of the Kindred of St. Columba and Abbot of Dunkeld, and had married the royal heiress Bethoc, daughter of Malcolm II.