It will doubtless have been observed that the _fabliau_--though the word is simply _fabula_ in one of its regular Romance metamorphoses, and though the method is sufficiently AEsopic--is not a "fable" in the sense more especially assigned to the term. Yet the mediaeval languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means destitute of fables properly so called. On the contrary, it would appear that it was precisely during our present period that the rather meagre AEsopisings of Phaedrus and Babrius were expanded into the fuller collection of beast-stories which exists in various forms, the chief of them being the _Ysopet_ (the name generally given to the class in Romance) of _Marie de France_, the somewhat later _Lyoner Ysopet_ (as its editor, Dr Foerster, calls it), and the original of this latter, the Latin elegiacs of the so-called _Anonymus Neveleti_.[137] The collection of Marie is interesting, at least, because of the author, whose more famous Lais, composed, it would seem, at the Court of Henry III. of England about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and forming a sort of offshoot less of the substance of the Arthurian story than of its spirit, are among the most delightful relics of mediaeval poetry. But the Lyons book perhaps exhibits more of the characteristic which, evident enough in the _fabliau_ proper, discovers, after passing as by a channel through the beast-fable, its fullest and most famous form in the world-renowned _Romance of Reynard the Fox_, one of the capital works of the Middle Ages, and with the sister but contrasted _Romance of the Rose_, as much the distinguishing literary product of the thirteenth century as the romances proper--Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Classical--are of the twelfth. [Footnote 137: Works of Marie; ed. Roquefort, Paris, 1820; or ed. Warnke, Halle, 1885. The _Lyoner Ysopet_, with the _Anonymus_; ed. Foerster, Heilbronn, 1882.] [Sidenote: Reynard the Fox.]