It was Sir Walter Scott who, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, invented the historical novel. It was Sir Ridley Scott (no relation) who, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, reinvented the historical epic. Of Walter Scott's medieval romances, Henry Beers wrote:

It is a vision that is already inherently cinematic, and it was in the 1950s – by which time Scott's novels were largely unread – that Hollywood turned three of his most celebrated medieval romances into big-budget films: Ivanhoe (Thorpe 1952), The Talisman (filmed as King Richard and the Crusaders (Butler 1954)) and The Adventures of Quentin Durward (Thorpe 1955). However, Walter Scott had a political agenda. First, he sought to define and elaborate chivalry as the appropriate code of behaviour for gentlemen, and it was to become the dominant code of masculinity in both Britain and America for a century and a half. Second, as a practical upholder of the Hanoverian settlement and the Anglican Church who dreamed romantically of Jacobitism, the sacred lost cause of Scotland, and of an idealised medieval past, he sought in his novels consistently to dramatise the idea of reconciliation: between Cavalier and Roundhead, highlander and lowlander, Norman and Saxon, Jacobite and Hanoverian, in the interests of building a unified nation.