Making use of the methodology developed in his Origins of Arthurian Romances (McFarland, 2012), the author explores the question of King Arthur's existence in several original approaches to the subject. Examining the extant literature and other evidence, the author searches for the truth of the who, when and where of King Arthur. These explorations are grouped into historicity, geography, and floruit, concluding that Arthur was an historical entity, places him in a specific area, and narrows his period of activity.

There are three archetypal and widespread Arthurian stories--the abduction of Guinevere, the Holy Grail, and Tristan. Through the author's painstaking research of the literature and comparative literature of the stories, and by studying the history, laws, and archaeology of the post-Roman period, a new methodology was found for approaching sources. This led to strong reasons for making a number of groundbreaking conclusions. Arthurian literature is a potential wealth of information on Arthur's Britain. More importantly, the nature of the holy grail has been in the grail literature and related materials all along. Author has a 1999 Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow in Medieval Studies with a thesis focusing on cross-disciplinary Arthurian Studies.

In this book, the author makes use of the methodology he developed in Origins of Arthurian Romances (McFarland 2012) in order to reevaluate the post-Roman history of Britain. He begins by delving into the historical contexts of the key traditional players of the fifth century-Hengest and Gwrtheyrn. A better understanding of these two characters allows for a reexamination of the persons and events of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. The text that follows entirely realigns how those centuries can be seen from a chronological as well as a military and political standpoint. The fifth century was not a time of British and Germanic fragmentation as they separated from Rome, but one of slow integration and the formation of kingships that were a result of the economic realities of surviving without the dying giant.

Using the author's wide-ranging background in the period's religions, culture, and chronology and both summarizing and synthesizing the advances in post-Roman studies since Leslie Alcock's 1971 classic Arthur's Britain, he has weaved historical documents, legends, archeology, and literature into a coherent and understandable history that begins with the weakening of Roman Britain and chronicles the transition of its people into sub-Roman communities and into British and Germanic kingdoms. Parallel to the political changes the book also describes the roles of religion, disease, the military, and the Irish and the Picts during the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries.