neral, and the
beast-fable in particular, are among the very oldest and most
universal of the known forms of literature. A fresh and special
development of it might have taken place in any country at any time.
It did, as a matter of fact, take place somewhere about the twelfth
century or earlier, and somewhere in the central part of the northern
coast district of the old Frankish empire.

[Sidenote: _The French form._]

As usual with mediaeval work, when it once took hold on the imagination
of writers and hearers, the bulk is very great, especially in the
French forms, which, taking them altogether, cannot fall much short of
a hundred thousand lines. This total, however, includes
developments--_Le Couronnement Renart_, _Renart le Nouvel_, and, later
than our present period, a huge and still not very well-known thing
called _Renart le Contrefait_, which are distinct additions to the
first conception of the story. Yet even that first conception is not a
story in the single sense. Its thirty thousand lines or thereabouts
are divided into a considerable number of what are called _branches_,
attributed to authors sometimes anonymous, sometimes named, but never,
except in the one case of _Renart le Bestourne_, known.[139] And it is
always difficult and sometimes impossible to determine in what
relation these branches stand to the main trunk, or which of them _is_
the main trunk. The two editors of the _Roman_, Meon and Herr Martin,
arrange them in different orders; and I do not think it would be in
the least difficult to make out a good case for an order, or even a
large number of orders, different still.[140]

[Footnote 139: This, which is not so much a branch as an independent
_fabliau_, is attributed to Ruteboeuf, _v. infra_.]

[Footnote 140: The Teutonic versions are consolidated into a more
continuous story. But of the oldest High German version, that of the
Glichezare, we have but part, and _Reincke de Vos_ does not reach
seven thousand verses. The French forms are therefore certainly to be
preferred.]

By comparison, however, with the versions in other languages, it seems
not very doubtful that the complaint of Isengrim the Wolf as to the
outrages committed by Reynard on the complainant's personal comfort,
and the honour of Hersent his wife--a complaint laid formally before
King Noble the Lion--forms, so far as any single thing can be said to
form it, the basis and beginning of the Reynard story. The
multiplicat