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Hello, in 1124 David I became King of Scotland and so began what's been called the Davidian

Revolution.

David was raised in the South in the Anglo-Norman Court and was already Earl of Huntington

and Prince of Cumbria and brought some of what he learned with him when he came north.

And in the next decade his kingdom saw new boroughs, new monasteries, new ways of governing,

the arrival of some very influential families and for him a reputation as the perfect King.

With me to discuss the Davidian Revolution are Richard Orham, Professor of Medieval and

Environmental History at the University of Sterling, Alice Taylor, Professor of Medieval

History at King's College London and Alex Wolff, Senior lecturer in history at the University

of St Andrews.

Alex Wolff, what was David's childhood and how was he brought up?

We don't know precisely when David was born but sometime in the 1080s and he would have

been born in Scotland perhaps in Dunham, but he was the youngest of his father's sons.

His father had six sons by his mother Margaret and at least two sons by an earlier wife.

So he had no expectation of becoming anyone important.

Both his parents died when he was somewhere between seven and ten years old and at that

point the family fled into exile when Donald Barn, the Donald Bain of Shakespeare's Macbeth,

...