Around 1320 a codex was made in Brabant which centuries later would prove to be of extraordinary importance to the study of Middle Dutch Arthurian romances. The collection of texts that has survived in this codex, at present preserved in the Royal Library of The Hague (MS 129 A 10), is better known as the Lancelot Compilation. The compiler of this codex has brought together no fewer than ten Middle Dutch Arthurian romances into an ordered sequence. This new compositional form, characterized by the arrangement of different romances into one comprehensive structure, probably marks a specific stage in the evolution of Arthurian literature. After all, the development of Arthurian romances into summae of Arthurian material is also attested by other European literatures. The Lancelot Compilation as a cycle of Arthurian romances is, for example, to a large extent comparable with the collection of Arthurian material preserved in MS fonds franfais 112 of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. This compilation, which dates from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, includes almost all important Old French Arthurian prose romances, such as the Lancelot en prose and the Tristan en prose.

The core of the Lancelot Compilation consists of a metrical translation of the Lancelot en prose, La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le Roi Artu.