Chanticleer and the Fox the question of its origin. It has also been asserted that the tale has developed out of the basic situation in Aesop's fable of The Fox and the Crow. Early examples of the story are pithily fabular but towards the middle of the 12th century it appears as an extended episode of the "Reynard cycle" under the title "How Renart captured Chanticleer the cock" ("Si comme Renart prist Chanticler le Coq"). The work of which it was part was immensely popular and spread widely in translation. The basic situation concerns the cock Chanticleer, who lives with his three wives in
The Cock and the Jewel in which a man inherits a valuable manuscript but prefers to have cash in hand for it. According to his reading of the fable, what the man and the cock lack is aesthetic judgement rather than wisdom. Some later interpretations are equally materialistic. Thomas Bewick applies the fable to the choice of sexual partner in his "Select Fables of Aesop" (1784), while the Canadian author Robertson Davies converts it to a playlet satirising devotees of the "Readers Digest" in his "A Masque of Aesop" (1955). Such a short fable suggested little latitude for invention to most book illustrators, apart from