Reaction to the Role of Kingship in Tales of Reynard the Fox

chapter 8 The King and the Fox: Reaction to the Role of Kingship in Tales of Reynard the Fox

By the late twelfth century the power of kingship on both sides of the Channel had become a dynamic force in a society vibrant with change. Capetian and Angevin monarchs increased their power, and royal systems of law broadened their outreach into society. Royal governance and law, no less than socio-economic and demographic change, the eruptions of popular piety, the growth of vernacular literatures, the rise of universities, both shaped and reflected High Medieval Europe. The French abbot and royal counsellor Suger and the English Exchequer official, Richard FitzNigel, both quote Ovid’s maxim that king’s have long arms.1 If scholars have established the broad landscape of these changes and mapped the particular place of royal activism within them, they have perhaps drawn up fewer charts indicating the social response to royal activism. To raise this question is not to speak naively of what ‘the people’ thought, but rather to seek the reaction of a significant (and growing) body of those with some political capacity. The question comes the more readily to mind after reading the fasci- nating recent book of Richard Firth Green on the shift from the world of troth to the more administrative and ‘scientific’ world of truth.2 Finding adequate sources involves us in difficulties, since we lack the copi- ous pamphlets, letters, diaries – to say nothing of the newspapers – available to our modern colleagues. Yet High Medieval literature can (if read carefully) open chinks in the wall that seems to separate us from our medieval past. Vernacular stories told about Reynard the Fox (written in Old French) provide just such a vantage point. Granted, much scholarship has been lavished on Reynard the Fox, but 9 it | has tended to focus on the stories as lively works of imaginative literature or, on the other hand, has closely elucidated particular points of legal procedure.3

* Previously published in Anthony Musson (ed.), Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2001), 9–21. 1 H. Waquet, ed., La Vie de Louis vi, le Gros (Paris, 1929), pp. 180–1; C. Johnson, ed., trans., Dialogus de Scaccario: The Dialogue of the Exchequer, revised by F.E.L. Carter and D.E. Greenway (Oxford, 1983), p. 84. 2 A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Riccardian England (Philadelphia, 1999). 3 Ample citations in K. Varty, The Roman de Renart: A Guide to Scholarly Work (Lanham, Md, 1998).

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I have no interest in (indeed no competence for) studying these stories for their aesthetic or structural (or post-structural) qualities, their delineation of character, their use of Aesop. Likewise, I leave the tough nuts and bolts of procedure to legal specialists.4 Instead, I want to show how these stories give us precious evidence about the social reception of the vigorous work of kings and their administrations. First, the basic nature of these stories must be briefly reviewed.5 In the late twelfth century and first half of the thirteenth approximately 26 tales about Reynard the Fox appear (or, rather, that number survives).6 Scholars posit as many as 20 anonymous authors. Several specific attributions, namely to Pierre de Saint Cloud, ‘a priest from La-Croix-en-Brie’ and Richard de Lison, remain names only. No fewer than 15 of these tales (and it is upon these that I will concentrate) were written in roughly the final quarter of the twelfth century (between 1174 and 1205) for an audience that evidently could not get enough of them. So popular were the stories that the Old French word for fox, goupil yields to the eponymous reynard. The chief quality of Reynard, which is, of course ‘foxiness’ or trickery in all its forms, is conveyed by the noun renardie. The collection of tales is traditionally called the Roman de Renart, and all of the tales are considered branches of the romance (numbered variously, accord- ing to more than one scholarly schema); but no genre classification, romance or other, truly fits.7 These are simply animal tales, with beasts acting in the rural world of field, forests, and farms, constantly hunting for food, but by a marvel- ous twist the animals regularly morph into humans, only to appear as animals again a few lines later. The changes are swift, almost like alternating current. The only characters who are unwaveringly people are peasants. The changeable characters are élite animal/humans, spurring on their horses, going on pilgrimage, holding courts, making war with banners snapping in the wind. Reynard’s den, a fox’s hole in the earth in one passage, will suddenly mushroom into a great fortress, Maupertuis, a few lines later. The effects are extraordinary. No less extraordinary, especially for any reader lost in the foggy, pre-Raphaelite | 10 vision of the Middle Ages, is the mud-slinging. Nothing escapes being hit, not even relics, pilgrimage, confession, crusade. Reynard at one point wipes his posterior with his crusader’s garb and hurls it into the Lion King’s face.8 Sex is

4 E.g. J. Graven, Le Procès criminel du Roman de Renart (Geneva, 1950). 5 What follows draws upon introductions to several recent scholarly editions: J. Dufournet and A. Méline, Le Roman de Renart, 2 vols (Paris, 1985); D.D.R. Owen, The Romance of Reynard the Fox (Oxford, 1994); A. Strubel, R. Bellon, D. Boutet, and S. Lefèvre, Le Roman de Renart (Paris, 1998). 6 The exact number of existing tales actually varies as combinations of tales appear in some collections. 7 I follow the numbering scheme of the Dufournet and Méline edition of Le Roman de Renart. 8 Ibid., i. p. 118.