Both romance and genealogy depend on the idea of continuity: romance because it is narrative, obviously, and genealogy because its function is to connect the present with the past, to make links and trace lineage. In both romance and genealogy, continuity – fictive or historical – may be constructed or foregrounded when issues of identity or inheritance are at stake. In late medieval England, especially, the interests of chivalric romance and of genealogy converged powerfully; certainly they did so in the work of a fifteenth-century Warwickshire chantry priest, John Rous, whose armorial rolls pressed both romance and genealogy into the service of his patrons, the earls of Warwick. I begin this discussion by exploring briefly a genealogical conundrum related to Warwick's influential local romance, that of Guy of Warwick, to raise the question of whether Rous was writing romance or history – or both.

One theory about the origins of the Anglo-Norman romance Gui de Warewic, the poem on which subsequent medieval versions, including the Middle English Guy of Warwick, were based, is complicated by a small genealogical problem. Here is the theory. It has been noticed that the Anglo-Norman Gui is at great pains to imply that the lords of Wallingford were hereditary stewards of the earls of Warwick. Now Wallingford had been held before the Conquest by Wigot (Wigod), whose name might be rendered in Anglo-Norman as Gwido and thus as Gui; Wigot's daughter Ealdgyth married a Norman, Robert d'Oilly, who may have been a sheriff of Warwick and who held lands in Warwickshire from Thurkil of Arden, one of only three or four Englishmen who still had substantial property at the time of the Domesday survey.