The Taill of Schir Chanticleir and The Foxe

The Taill of Schir Chanticleir and the Foxe is Fabill 3 of Robert Henryson's cycle of thirteen Morall Fabillis composed in Scotland in the later fifteenth century. It is the first of the fabillis in the poem to be based on Reynardian and beast epic sources rather than on any strictly Aesopian original, although the closest match from Aesop might be The Dog, the Cock and the Fox.

One of its most direct known sources is Geoffrey Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale from the Canterbury Tales written perhaps around ninety years earlier. It might also be argued that Henryson was acquainted with the earlier extended telling of the story in the Reynard cycle. Chanticleir, for example, has three wives, as in the earlier French romance, where Chaucer gives seven to his Chauntecleer.

Henryson's version was probably composed sometime around the 1480s.