The Silesian traveler Nicholas von Popplau, who visited the English court in 1484, described Richard as having “a lean form, delicate arms and legs, but a great heart.” He did not describe a hunchback or a withered arm. The Italian visitor Dominic Mancini, who was in England during the events of 1483 and wrote an account shortly afterward, described Richard’s face as “ferocious” but did not mention physical deformity.
The contemporary chronicler John Rous did describe physical characteristics that have received new attention since the 2012 discovery. Rous was a priest and antiquary from Warwick who wrote at different times both favorable and unfavorable accounts of Richard, the shift in tone corresponding predictably to the change in political regime. In his *Historia Regum Angliae*, written after Bosworth under the Tudors, Rous described Richard as having “a short face, unequal shoulders, the right higher and the left lower” — a description of asymmetric shoulders that corresponds to what the skeletal analysis found.
The scoliosis in the Leicester skeleton would have produced exactly this asymmetry. The scoliosis was identified as idiopathic adolescent scoliosis, meaning it developed during adolescence rather than being congenital. This distinction matters for understanding how the condition would have appeared in life. Richard would have grown up without visible asymmetry and developed the curvature during his teenage years — years during which he was already engaged in the political and military activities that defined his adult career.
The degree of spinal curvature described by the osteologists was substantial. The S-shape in the skeleton was pronounced. But photographs of the skeleton alongside reconstructions of how this would have translated into posture suggest a person with visible asymmetry of the shoulders and trunk, not the extreme deformity depicted in theatrical tradition. The condition was real and visible; the theatrical exaggeration of it belongs to the tradition rather than to the physical evidence.