The Norman poet Wace completed his Roman de Brut in 1155, a verse adaptation in Old French of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. Wace transformed Geoffrey's Latin prose into 14,866 octosyllabic couplets, making the Arthurian legends accessible to a much wider French-speaking audience. Most significantly, it was Wace who introduced the Round Table into the Arthurian tradition, a detail not found in Geoffrey. He dedicated the work to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and it became the foundation for Layamon's Middle English Brut, ensuring the Arthurian legend took root in English vernacular literature.

Wace's Roman de Brut is a pivotal text in the transmission of Arthurian literature, introducing the Round Table — one of the most enduring symbols in Western narrative poetry — and shaping how Chrétien de Troyes and later romancers imagined Arthur's court. Layamon's subsequent adaptation into Middle English made the stories available without Latin or French, effectively nationalising the Arthurian legend for an English-speaking audience. The dedication to Eleanor signalled how elite patronage and vernacular literary ambition were becoming intertwined.