The character and accomplishment of the story, however, are matters of much more purely literary interest than the rather barren question of the probable--it is not likely that it will ever be the proved--date or place of origin of this famous thing. The fable in general, 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 multiplication of complaints by other beasts, the sufferings inflicted by Reynard on the messengers sent to summon him to Court, and his escapes, by mixture of fraud and force, when he is no longer able to avoid putting in an appearance, supply the natural continuation.