SOURCE: “Early Branches of the Roman de Renart,” in Reynard the Fox, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 33-69.

In the following excerpt, Best describes and summarizes the various French tales collected under the name of the Roman de Renart.

About the year 1176 a trouvère named Pierre de Saint-Cloud wrote what seems to be the first medieval beast epic in a popular language.¹ It consists of some 2,410 eight-syllable verses in rhymed couplets, and its plot is devoted principally to another feud between the fox, named Renart, and Ysengrin the wolf, both of whom are barons in Noble the lion's kingdom. It was so well received that imitations soon appeared. By circa 1250 some twenty-six Gallic tales about Reynard (the exact number depending on how one counts) were circulating as so-called branches, in the same verse form as Pierre de Saint-Cloud's poem, and were being collected as the Roman de Renart. Initially...