Northumbrian province which, at one period, could be scarcely reckoned as an integral, or settled, portion of either England or Scotland. David probably interfered but little with the privileges of the ancient earls within their immediate possessions, limiting his innovations upon their earlier duties and prerogatives to the introduction of the royal _Vicecomes_: but William was enabled to advance a step further; the royal authority was becoming firmer, and was now made paramount throughout the settled portion of Scotland, except where the greater barons or higher clergy were specially privileged; though the right to execute within the precincts of his own barony the homicide taken “red-hand,” or the robber captured with the stolen cattle, still remained the privilege of every baron who claimed the jurisdiction of “pit and gallows.” In pursuance of his usual line of policy, William also carried out the ecclesiastical and commercial measures of his predecessors, ordering the general payment of tithes and dues throughout the kingdom, defining the means by which his edicts were to be put in force, and assimilating the dioceses of Aberdeen and Moray to the model bishoprics of Glasgow and St. Andrews.[517] More than this he appears to have been unable to effect, for the church lands in the sees of Brechin and Dunblane were still in the possession of great lay feudatories, disinclined as yet to restore the property to the bishops, and too powerful to be rendered discontented by any overprompt measures of alienation. Even in Dunkeld the chapter was not as yet provided for; Ross was in a chronic state of rebellion during the greater part of this reign; and Caithness was at this time hardly more than a nominal province of Scotland. Only one religious foundation is ascribed to William, the monastery of Arbroath, which he dedicated to the memory of Thomas à Becket, with whom he is sometimes said to have been on terms of familiar intimacy at the English court in his earlier years; and from the date of this tribute to the memory of the martyred archbishop, which was completed and endowed within a very few years after the king’s return from captivity, it would certainly appear as if William had been very much impressed at the time by the peculiar circumstances of his capture.[518]