the church was shown to have suffered from their licence.[261] One of the most important objects of David’s policy at length appeared to be satisfactorily attained, and the great northern fiefs of his wife’s father added securely to the Scottish crown. They were at present held by his son, and in some sort as a guarantee of neutrality towards Stephen, which, though slight was so far effectual that it restrained David from ill-advised hostilities; whilst the feeble hold of Stephen upon the fiefs in question must have rendered him unwilling, as long as a nominal peace was preserved, to risk the chances of an ineffectual forfeiture which he could have scarcely hoped to carry out. In the event of the Duke of Normandy’s accession, there was the solemn contract ratified at Carlisle, which was to confirm the Scottish princes in the hereditary possession of these fiefs, in which it might well be hoped that a kindred people in language, origin, and laws, would amalgamate in course of time, under the fostering rule of the representatives of the sainted Edward, with the Anglian inhabitants of the Lothians. Even the population of that great Episcopal Palatinate, where the bishop ruled with regal power and privileges over a district scarcely yet included in Norman England at the time of the Domesday survey, was in sympathy and in race far more akin to the Angles of Bernicia than to the descendants of the Scandinavian conquerors of the Danelage; and the tendency of the men of Durham to turn their regards towards the North, was sedulously encouraged ever since the days of Margaret. It was her husband, the Scottish Malcolm, who laid the first stone of the new church in the Episcopal city; her sons and their leading nobles who enriched with their donations her favourite monastery; and now the last and greatest of her immediate family sheltered the sacred territory of St. Cuthbert from the miseries of southern England, and secured for it the advantages of peace. The grant of the English fief of Furness to Wimund, by which a troublesome enemy was converted into a questionable feudatory, and the confirmation of Skipton, also a dependency of the English crown, to William Fitz Duncan, were carried out by the Scottish king without the slightest reference to the prerogatives of the English sovereign; and owing to the distracted state of England during the reign of Stephen, never was Scotland at any period of her history more powerful relatively to her southern neighbour, than during the last ten years of David’s reign. [Sidenote: A. D. 1152. 12th June.]