seizes her; the partridge persuades the fox to pronounce her name before eating her and so escapes. In the following century Marie de France tells a fable very similar to the Renart version in Old French verse. Similar short tales had followed the long telling in the Reynard Cycle. They include the story of Renart and the Tomtit, in which the frustrated fox tries to persuade his 'cousin' to greet him with a kiss and eventually has to flee at the approach of dogs. This is obviously a variant version of The Cock, the Dog and the Fox. After another episode (in which Renart injures his paw), the fable of the Fox and the Crow is adapted to become the tale of Renart and Tiécelin. Here the fox flatters the crow into singing and so dropping the round cheese it has stolen. Even this early, such a grouping indicates that contemporaries were aware of the kinship of these stories. Two other longer adaptations of the fable were eventually written in Britain. The first of these was Geoffrey Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale, a section of his extended work, The Canterbury Tales, that was written about 1390. This consists of 626 lines of 10-syllable couplets and introduces significant variations. The scene takes place in a poor woman's garden-close where Chauntecleer the cock presides over a harem of seven hens, among whom Pertolete is his favourite. When Chauntecleer has a premonitory dream of his capture, it is Pertolete who argues that it has no significance and initiates a long and learned debate on the question. The rest of the story is much as in the other versions except that at the end the fox tries to charm down the escaped cock a second time before the two creatures condemn their own credulous foolishness. The tale remained popular so long as Chaucer's Middle English was generally accessible to people. Then the poet John Dryden wrote an updated version titled "The Cock and the Fox" (1700). Although this follows Chaucer's text more or less closely, he adds a few comments of his own and expands it to 820 lines in heroic couplets. In the meantime the Scottish poet Robert Henryson had produced his freer version of Chaucer's tale, The Taill of Schir Chanticleir and the Foxe, written in the 1480s. This consists of 31 rhyme royal stanzas and is more or less dependent on