One of the things the writers of late Arthurian collections have in common is that they all base their work on an already rich tradition that had blossomed centuries earlier. These writers therefore needed to combine a wide range of source materials from different traditions and in different languages, most notably French and other vernaculars. Given the popularity of Arthurian stories in the thirteenth century, the tales would have been familiar to a large proportion of their audience, making it necessary for later adaptors to remain close to their source material. As Jane Taylor puts it:

In addition to this, the authors also needed to reconcile contradictions between sources, and above all to create a plausible time structure within which to accommodate all the adventures they wished to include.

Taking the Buch and the Morte as two very different examples of particularly late chronographies, this chapter compares the representation of time in these works to the more elaborate descriptive contextualisation of the Lancelot–Grail cycle, which is a common indirect source of both works.