By the late twelfth century the power of kingship on both sides of the Channel had become a dynamic force in a society vibrant with change. Capetian and Angevin monarchs increased their power, and royal systems of law broadened their outreach into society.Royal governance and law, no less than socio-economic and demographic change, the eruptions of popular piety, the growth of vernacular literatures, the rise of universities, both shaped and reflected High Medieval Europe. The French abbot and royal counsellor Suger and the English Exchequer official, Richard FitzNigel, both quote Ovid's maxim that king's have long arms.

If scholars have established the broad landscape of these changes and mapped the particular place of royal activism within them, they have perhaps drawn up fewer charts indicating the social response to royal activism. To raise this question is not to speak naively of what ‘the people’ thought, but rather to seek the reaction of a significant (and growing) body of those with some political capacity. The question comes the more readily to mind after reading the fascinating recent book of Richard Firth Green on the shift from the world of troth to the more administrative and ‘scientific’ world of truth.

Finding adequate sources involves us in difficulties, since we lack the copious pamphlets, letters, diaries to say nothing of the newspapers available to our modern colleagues. Yet High Medieval literature can (if read carefully) open chinks in the wall that seems to separate us from our medieval past. Vernacular stories told about Reynard the Fox (written in Old French) provide just such a vantage point.

Granted, much scholarship has been lavished on Reynard the Fox, but it has tended to focus on the stories as lively works of imaginative literature or, on the other hand, has closely elucidated particular points of legal procedure. I have no interest in (indeed no competence for) studying these stories for their aesthetic or structural (or post-structural) qualities, their delineation of character, their use of Aesop. Likewise, I leave the tough nuts and bolts of procedure to legal specialists. Instead, I want to show how these stories give us precious evidence about the social reception of the vigorous work of kings and their administrations.

First, the basic nature of these stories must be briefly reviewed.