THE SEARCH FOR THE GRAIL

After the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the early fourth century, his mother the Empress Helena ordered the excavation of the Holy Sepulchre, the purported site of Christ's tomb in Jerusalem. During the excavation a cup was found, which many believed to be the vessel used by Jesus himself at the Last Supper. According to the fifth-century historian Olympiodorus, it was smuggled out of Rome when the city was sacked by the barbarian Visigoths in 410 AD. What became of the sacred relic is unknown, but well into the Middle Ages the legend survived that it was safely taken to the last outpost of Roman civilisation in western Europe - the isle of Britain.
In legend, the cup became the most sacred relic of all - the Holy Grail. It was believed to hold miraculous healing powers, and in medieval literature the search for the Grail became an eternal quest for King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Then, in the early 1600s, the Shropshire landowner Robert Vernon claimed to have discovered the true hiding place of the Grail. On his deathbed Vernon said that he had learned of its whereabouts from a medieval ecclesiastical narrative called the Peverel. He died without revealing his secret, or producing the document as proof.
In 1994, historical detective Graham Phillips discovered an astonishing confirmation of Vernon's claim. The Peverel did exist, surviving in a fourteenth-century manuscript in the vaults of the British Library. Listed as the Historia Anglicarum: Regem XII the manuscript tells how the Grail was kept by an order of monks at an abbey in Shropshire just a few miles from Vernon's home at Hodnet. Remarkably, the work did not refer to the Grail as a mythical relic, but as the historical artefact discovered by the Empress Helena in Jerusalem in the year 327.
This new evidence for the existence of the sacred cup initiated a twentieth-century search for the Holy Grail, an incredible adventure following a trail of mysterious clues left years ago in the English countryside. The Search for the Grail is the remarkable true story of a modern-day quest.