Propaganda: John Rous and the Rous Roll

Much of the history of the Medieval era was written by chroniclers, monastics who listed events that came to their attention one right after the other.  There were also historians and antiquarians, scholars who loved history for its own sake.  And, as the Wars of the Roses heated up, there were propagandists.  Propaganda is nothing new.  Kings have always needed writers willing to put their pens and scholarship to the use of the royal dynasty.  The Yorks had an able historian in John Rous, c 1420-1492, a cleric, historian and antiquarian who wrote an ambitious history of the kings of England from the reign of Brutus of Britain, who may not have existed, through Henry VII. 

John Rous was born in Warwick and educated at Oxford.  He entered the clergy and spent most of his professional career in his home town.  He became chaplain of the chapel at Guy's Cliffe and canon of the collegiate church at Warwick.  In addition to his history of the kings of England, he also created the Rous Roll, an illustrated pro-Yorkist review of recent English history.  Interestingly enough, the Roll is illustrated with a number of colored and lined drawings of the characters prominent in English history.  Whether Rous himself drew the illustrations is not known today.  Because the roll was written during the reign of Richard III, Richard comes off as a good and wise king, a "good lord" who worked against the oppression of the common people.  However, by the time he got around to writing his magnum opus, the history of the kings of England, Henry VII was on the throne and Rous threw Richard III under the bus.  He was a freak who was born with teeth and took two years to conceive in his mother's womb.  He was a twisted hunchback, with a twisted mind, evil and tyrannical.  It is from Rous that the image of Richard the hunchback with a paranoid and homicidal streak comes from.

Rous wrote a Warwick roll, detailing the Beauchamp family, who were Earls of Warwick before Anne Beauchamp married the Kingmaker.  He also wrote other works on Warwickshire history, the history of Oxford and Cambridge, and a treatise about giants who survived the flood of Noah.  Even at the time, his histories were criticized for having incorporated myths from earlier chroniclers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth.  Rous died in 1492 and was buried in St. Mary's Church, Warwick, donating his extensive personal library to the church.