The History Reynard The

The History of Reynard the Fox William Caxton’s English Translation of 1481 originally published in 1889 as part of Early Prose Romances The Carisbrooke Library, Volume IV Edited By Henry Morley, LL.D. LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS Broadway, Ludgate Hill Glasgow, Manchester, and New York 1889 Introduction to the Digital Edition This text was prepared for digital publication by David Badke in October, 2003. It was scanned from the original printed text on an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner and converted with OmniPage Pro 12. Editor: Henry Morley (1822-1894) was a physician, a Lecturer in English at King’s College in London, and a Professor of English Language and Literature at University College. He edited over three hundred volumes of English literature and other literary texts. Copyright: The original printed text edited by Henry Morley as published by George Routledge and Sons in 1889 is believed to be in the public domain under Canadian copyright law. It is also believed to be in the public domain under the copyright law of the United Kingdom and the United States of America. If you believe that you have a legal claim on the original text, contact the editor of the digital edition at [email protected] with details of your claim. This digital edition is copyright 2003 by David Badke. Permission is hereby granted for any non-commercial use, provided that this copyright notice is included on all copies; for commercial use, please contact the editor at the above email address. Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to produce a digital edition that is accurate and equivalent in content to the original printed edition, the editor is not legally responsible for any errors or omissions. As with any information, use this edition with appropriate scholarly caution. If you discover errors in the text, please contact the editor at [email protected] with details, so corrections can be made. Edition: This digital edition does not include the entire text of Henry Morley’s book, Early Prose Romances. Only part of the Introduction and the whole of The History of Reynard the Fox are included here. Formatting: The digital edition differs from the original printed text in layout, typeface and pagination, though all text of the original has been included as printed; no editing has been done (other than to correct a small number of obvious typographic errors), and all original spelling and punctuation has been retained. The page numbers shown in this edition (at the bottom of each page) do not match the page numbering of the original printed edition. The original page numbers have been added to allow references to the print edition to be located; the number indicates the start of the print edition page. These page numbers appear imbedded in the text, formatted like this: [27]. The footnote numbering in the printed text started at 1 on each page, as it does in this edition; however, since the pagination in this edition does not match that of the printed edition, the footnote numbers here do not always match those in the printed edition. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• The current version of this digital text edition can be found at: http://bestiary.ca/etexts/morley1889/morley1889.htm •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Introduction1 Henry Morley 2 [11] THIS volume contains seven old stories. The first of them is the old Beast Epic of “Reynard the Fox,” in Caxton’s translation from the Flemish. Jacob Grimm believed that these fables of beasts applied, with a strong national feeling, to corruption growing among strong men who wronged the poor and used religion only as a cloak for violence and fraud, were from their origin Teutonic. Like fables elsewhere [they] could in great measure be accounted for by the like suggestion of natural resemblance between beasts and men. But it has been observed that the earliest known use of such fabling by a German writer is in Fredegar's Chronicle, quoted under the year 612 as a “rustica fabula” of the Lion, the Fox, and the Stag, which distinctly follows Æsop, and undergoes change afterwards from the fancy of narrators. The story also of the remedy suggested by the Fox to the sick Lion (see in this volume a chapter of Caxton’s “Reynart”) comes from Æsop. It was developed in the eighth century in a Latin poem ascribed to the Lombard Paulus Diaconus, who may have had it at the court of Charlemagne as matter already familiar among the Franks. Either from Byzantium or through contact with Rome, such fables could readily have passed into the hearing or the reading of Teutonic monks, who cared about God and the people, steeped the fables in minds active for reform, and developed them, as the Teutonic races developed also the Arthurian myths, into forms inseparable from their nationality. [12] The sick Lion reappears in the tenth century in the oldest poem elaborated as a Beast Epic, the “Ecbasis cujusdam Captivi.” Its author belonged to the monastery of St. Evre, at Toul. Strict reforms among the brethren, in the year 936, caused his Ecbasis—his going out. He was brought back, and as a sign of his regeneration wrote the poem, in which he figured himself “per tropologiam” as a calf, who, having gone out from safety, became captive to the wolf. The “Ecbasis” has already incidents that become further developed in the myth of “Reynart.” The next stage of growth is marked by the Latin poem “Ysengrimus,” which was first named “Reinardus Vulpes.” It was written about the year 1148 by a Flemish priest, Nivardus of Ghent. Here we have the names that afterwards entered so completely into the speech of Europe that the old French word for a fox, Goupil, was replaced by Renard, 1 This is an excerpt from Morley’s introduction, comprising only the part dealing with Reynard the Fox and Caxton’s translation. 2 Only the Reynard story is included in this digital edition. 1 Reinaert. Reynard or Reginhard means absolutely hard, a hardened evil-doer whom there is no turning from his way. It is altogether out of this old story that the Fox has come by that name. Isegrim, the Wolf’s name, is also Flemish—Isengrin meaning the iron helm. The bear they named Bruno, Bruin, for the colour of his coat. The earliest French version of this national satire is lost. There are traces of it to be found in the later “Roman de Renard” which confirm the belief that it was known to and used by the Alsatian Heinrich der Glichezare (the name means simulator), who about the year 1180 wrote the first “Reinart” in German. He first called it “Isengrine’s Not”:— Nû vernemet seltsarniu dinc and vremdiu maere der der Glichesaere inkünde gît, si sint gewaerlich Er ist geheizen Heinrich, der hât diu buoch zesamene geleit von Isengrînes arbeit. The poem was afterwards entitled “Reinhart Fuhs.” There remain two MSS. of it, one at Heidelberg, the other in the Bishop’s Library at Kalocsa, in Hungary. Its vigorous author was one of [13] the poets who lived of old by voice as well as pen, themselves reciting what they wrote. From a French poem on the same subject, written in the beginning of the thirteenth century by a priest, Pierre de St. Cloud, came the Flemish poem of “Reinhart,” by Willem, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. This was continued by another poet of less mark about the year 1380. A prose commentary on this appeared in 1480, and a Low German translation of it was printed and published at Lübeck in 1498. In the earliest form of the story, in the tenth century, the Fox triumphed. Willem’s “Reinaert” ended with the exile of the Fox from court. It was the continuer of Willem in 1380 who brought the Fox back, and told of his judicial combat with Isegrim, and showed hypocrisy again triumphant. Willem’s Low German poem of “Reinaert” was followed by a prose “Hystorie van Regnaert die Vos,” printed at Gouda, in Holland, by Gerard Leeu, in 1479. Caxton’s translation was made from the Low German, and retains many Teutonic words in their Dutch form, which was also the form most nearly allied to English. Caxton’s long residence at Bruges made the language as familiar to him as his own, and sometimes his English includes a word from the other side of the boundary between English and Dutch. The first edition of Caxton’s translation was finished at Westminster in June 1481. There was a 2 second edition in 1489, of which the only known copy is in the Pepys Library at Cambridge. Caxton’s translation is, as the reader will find, free, vigorous, and lively; but, as printed by himself, it is not only without breaks of paragraph, but there is a punctuation in which the end of one sentence is now and then detached from its own connection and joined to the beginning of another, and in various ways the pleasant features of the story are seen dimly sometimes as through a veil. I have, therefore, corrected absolute mistakes, and broken the story into paragraphs that mark the briskness of its dialogue and of its homely wit. Old words and grammatical forms have been left, but I have preferred to print familiar words that remain [14] to us in modern English in the spelling that now brings their sense most quickly to the reader’s mind. An exact transcript of Caxton’s “History of Reynard the Fox” is easily to he had. It was published in 1880 by Professor Arber, of Mason's College, Birmingham, in his “English Scholar’s Library,” and can be received from him through the post for eighteenpence.1 This old story, said Thomas Carlyle, “comes before us with a character such as can belong only to very few—that of being a true world’s Book, which, through centuries, was everywhere at home, the spirit of which diffused itself into all languages and all minds.

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