Thus begins Cursor Mundi (c. 1300), listing popular subjects for romances. It continues with Brutus (‘Furste conqueroure of engelande’), Arthur, Gawain, Kay, the Round Table, Charlemagne, Roland, Tristan and Isolde and others, a concatenation of great heroes, pagan and Christian. Moving on to ‘paramours’ (courtly love), its mutability and miseries (lines 51–110), the poet offers his alternative narrative, a history of salvation, with Mary as a pure mistress who never fails her lovers.

This prologue to a religious work illustrates the ease with which pagan antiquity had gained a prime position among subjects for romance and also within a concept of history that had crucial significance for romance writing and its audiences: history as a linear sequence of great realms and great knights and kings, from Hector and Alexander to Arthur, Charlemagne and beyond. The sequence is an aristocratic world history as well as a founding story for England and romance writing. Brutus, the legendary Trojan founder of Britain, is its crucial link, joining the classical and post-classical subjects. This chain of noble narratives celebrates chivalric ideology, the values that constructed medieval aristocrats’ cultural identity. Both the knightly caste and its gentil ideals are regularly conceived in romances as existing unchanged across time, with pagan heroes of antiquity depicted as knights or barons engaged in conflicts resembling those of medieval Europe, even at times battling with Saracens.

This concept parallels another model of history that links the Christian era to its pre-Christian past: the early Church, notably in Augustine's The City of God, had constructed a historical narrative from Creation to Doomsday, demonstrating God's dealings with the world (Augustine integrated events such as the Fall of Troy and Aeneas’ story into this Christian history). Cursor Mundi's salvation narrative is just such a linear history. The concatenation of pagan and Christian romance heroes represents an analogous secular history, and confidence in the divinely inspired and unified progression of human history as a sequence of great warriors and leaders supported belief in myths that made modern Western European realms the inheritors from classical founders: Britain from Brutus, the Franks from Priam, Scotland from Alexander's retainer Gadifer, and so on.