This book began by examining the role played by the Trojan legend in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anglo-Scots Wars of Independence and concomitant ‘War of Historiography’. It discussed how during the Wars of Independence (and in subsequent periods of Anglo-Scots conflict) a myth of Trojan origins was deployed by English monarchs to bolster their claims to lordship and ownership of Scotland. To oppose this, and instead prove Scotland's independence and sovereignty, Scottish historians traced their nation's origins to a Greek prince, Gaythelos, and his Egyptian wife, Scota. The appeal to an alternative origin legend enabled the Scots to derive their origins from a parent race at least as old as, if not older than, the Trojan remnant. That parent race was, moreover, most crucially victorious against the ancestors of the English in the Trojan War.

The book subsequently set out to examine how the Scots responded in literature produced in the centuries immediately after the Wars of Independence to a legend previously used against them. It sought to determine whether there was a specifically Scottish response to the Trojan legend and, if so, what form that response took. In a related vein, it sought to understand precisely what the Trojan legend meant to Scottish writers and readers, and to what extent the Scottish representation of the Trojan legend changed over time. Many of these questions can now be answered in light of the foregoing study.