The History of Reynard the Fox

edited by Henry Morley, LL.D.

William Caxton's English Translation of 1481
originally published as part of Early Prose Romances
George Routledge and Sons
London, 1889

Reynard the Fox was medieval Europe's trickster figure, a nasty but charistmatic character who was always in trouble but always able to talk his way out of any retribution. The Reynard stories were (and are) available in several languages and with many variations. The digital text published here is a version translated to English by William Caxton in the late 15th century. Caxton printed his translation himself on his own printing press, one of the first in England. In editing this edition in 1889, Morley modernized the spelling of words still in common use in his day, but did not attempt to modernize the style of the text. The result is a readable text that has all the flavor of the original.

Full edition (392 KB file)

Plain text edition (no formatting, text only, Unicode UTF-8 character set - 260 KB file)

The print edition of this text was published in London in 1889; the digital edition was created from the original in 2003 by David Badke. The digital edition includes only part of Morley's introduction and all of the text of The History of Reynard the Fox. The original print edition by Henry Morley (1822-1892) is believed to be in the public domain. The digital edition is copyright 2003 by David Badke, but can be used for any non-commercial purpose without further permission. See the copyright notice in the digital edition for more information.

The digital edition has been published as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. To read it, you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 4+), available from the Adobe Web site.