Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain is like no previous book on Post-Roman Britain. It demonstrates that the current image of 'Arthur' as a Dark Age chieftain fighting a last-ditch battle against Saxon invaders is very much a myth. But it also shows that a coherent explanation for all the earliest sources is impossible without placing a powerful British military leader at the very centre of fifth century events.

And this leader was much earlier than previously suspected. Far from being a Dark Age warlord, he employed a sophisticated Roman military and naval strategy to make Britain secure. First he united the island in a series of battles in every corner of the island. Then he used alliances with various foreign mercenaries to bring about two decades of peace.

But one thing he could not overcome was the ethnic antagonism between Briton and Saxon. In 469 civil war tore his world apart. In the coming centuries some would remember him as the great hero who had brought peace and unity to Britain. Others would see him only as the ruler who had betrayed the island to the Saxons. In the end the two views could never be reconciledso much so that the earliest accounts of him have been routinely dismissed as fatally flawed.

But Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain shows that these apparently conflicting sources possess an underlying unitya unity that for the first time allows us to learn what really happened in Britain's most decisive century. .