The Douglas family (per. c.1170–c.1300), barons, was of Flemish origin, possibly part of the marked Flemish settlement in upper Clydesdale, found in the reign of Malcolm IV (1153–1165). But William Douglas, the earliest known member of the Douglas family, is attested only in the last quarter of the twelfth century. None the less, he was brother (less probably brother-in-law) of a Freskin of Kerdale, a Moray landowner, and both must have been related to the Freskin who was given land in Moray by David I, confirmed to his son William by Malcolm IV. The recurrence of these names and also of Hugh and Archibald in both families attests to their common ancestry, so that when a branch of the Moray family inherited the lordship of Bothwell in Lanarkshire in the 1240s, their near neighbours, the lords of Douglas, were distant kin. The senior line in Moray presumably procured the nomination of Brice Douglas (d. 1222), a son of William Douglas and prior of Lesmahagow in Lanarkshire, as bishop of Moray in 1203; the Brice (not a common name) who was a parson and dean of Christianity in Moray between 1188 and 1203 would be a Moray cousin. Bishop Brice brought his brother Freskin, parson of Douglas, to be dean, and three other brothers to be canons, of the cathedral chapter which he established in 1206–8 at Spynie, with the customs of Lincoln; hitherto the see had been peripatetic.