far as I have been able to find it, I have inserted many
passages in this work of mine own also."

It will thus be seen that about 1209, Helinand became a monk at
Froid-mont, and it is exceedingly improbable that any portion of
his "Chronicle" was written before that date. On the other hand,
his `familiar' Guarin only became Bishop of Senlis in 1214, and
died in 1227, (12) so that it is certain Helinand wrote the last
part of his "Chronicle" not later than the last-mentioned year.
The limits of time, therefore, between which the "Chronicle" was
written are clearly circumscribed; and if it is impossible to
define the exact year in which this particular entry was made, it
is not, I fancy, beyond the legitimate bounds of critical
conjecture.

On the first page of the Romance, Helinand read that an Angel
had appeared to a certain hermit in Britain and revealed to him
the history of the Holy Graal. In transferring the record of
this event to his "Chronicle", he was compelled by the exigencies
of his system, which required the insertion of every event
recorded under some particular year, to assign a date to the
occurrence. A vague "five hundred years ago" would be likely to
suggest itself as an appropriate time at which the occurrence
might be supposed to have taken place; and if he were writing in
1220, the revelation to the hermit would thus naturally be
relegated to the year 720, the year under which the entry
actually appears. This, of course, is pure guesswork, but the
fact remains that the "Chronicle" was written in or about 1220,
and the "Book of the Graal" not long before it.