Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

It is the singing voice that makes the difference; and it is a difference of thought as well as of style.

CHAPTER VI
COMIC POETRY

France sets the model for comic as well as romantic poetry, in the Middle Ages. In romance the English were not able for a long time—hardly before Chaucer and Gower—to imitate the French style properly; the French sentiment was beyond them, not appreciated; they took the stories, the action and adventures, and let the sentiment alone, or abridged it. The reasons for this are obvious. But there seems to be no reason, except accident, for the way in which the English writers in those times neglected the French comic literature of the twelfth century. Very little of it is represented in the English of the following centuries; yet what there is in English corresponding to the French fabliaux and to Reynard the Fox is thoroughly well done. The English wit was quite equal to the French in matters such as these; there were no difficulties of style or caste in the way, such as prevented the English minstrels from using much of the French romantic, sentimental rhetoric. There might have been a thirteenth-century English Reynard, as good as the High or Low German Reynards; that is proved by the one short example (295 lines) in which an episode of the great medieval comic epic is told by an English versifier—the story of The Vox and the Wolf. This is one of the best of all the practical jokes of Reynard—the well-known story of the Fox and the Wolf in the well. It is told again, in a different way, among the Fables of the Scottish poet Robert Henryson; it is also one of the stories of Uncle Remus.

A vox gan out of the wodè go,

and made his way to a hen-roost, where he got three hens out of five, and argued with Chauntecler the cock, explaining, though unsuccessfully, that a little blood-letting might be good for him; thence, being troubled with thirst, he went to the well. The well had two buckets on a rope over a pulley; the Fox ‘ne understood nought of the gin’ and got into one of the buckets and went down to the bottom of the well; where he repented of his gluttony. The comic epic is as moral as Piers Plowman; that is part of the game.

Then (‘out of the depe wode’) appeared the Wolf, Sigrim (Isengrim), also thirsty, and looking for a drink; he heard the lamentations of his gossip Reneuard, and sat down by the well and called to him. Then at last the Fox’s wit returned and he saw how he might escape. There was nothing (he said) he would have prayed for more than that his friend should join him in the happy place: ‘here is the bliss of Paradise’. ‘What! art thou dead?’ says the Wolf: ‘this is news; it was only three days ago that thou and thy wife and children all came to dine with me.’ ‘Yes! I am dead’, says the Fox. ‘I would not return to the world again, for all the world’s wealth. Why should I walk in the world, in care and woe, in filth and sin? But this place is full of all happiness; here is mutton, both sheep and goat.’ When the Wolf heard of this good meat his hunger overcame him and he asked to be let in. ‘Not till thou art shriven’, says the Fox; and the Wolf bends his head, sighing hard and strong, and makes his confession, and gets forgiveness, and is happy.

Nou ich am in clene live

Ne recche ich of childe ne of wive.

‘But tell me what to do.’ ‘Do!’ quoth the Fox, ‘leap into the bucket, and come down.’ And the Wolf going down met the Fox half-way; Reynard, ‘glad and blithe’ that the Wolf was a true penitent and in clean living, promised to have his soul-knell rung and masses said for him.

The well, it should be said, belonged to a house of friars; Aylmer the ‘master curtler’ who looked after the kitchen-garden came to the well in the morning; and the Wolf was pulled out and beaten and hunted; he found no bliss and no indulgence of blows.