Fox
An "old fox" today means what it did in the
fourteenth century. When Chaucer's heroine Criseyde says to her
uncle, who has arranged for her seduction: "Fox that ye ben
[are]," she indicates that he has been crafty and
dissimulating. In Biblical times it had the same meaning.
"Go ye and tell that fox," says Christ, alluding to
Herod Antipas, "Behold, I cast out devils" (Luke
xiii.32).
Although the fox still retains the quality anciently
attributed to it, it was always regarded as pejorative. In China
the fox was a shape-shifter as well as a symbol of craftiness. It
might possess the soul of a deceased mortal and was, therefore,
the emblem of longevity.
In the Middle Ages the fox's symbolic role was extensive.
Of all the animal figures it was the one most frequently used in
art and architecture. We can still see that symbolic fox in
ecclesiastical sculpture and carvings, on tiles, croziers,
embroidery ,and in illustrations in Gothic manuscripts.
Its popularity was due to the early importance of the fox
in fable and in beast epic. Appearing in the fables of Aesop, a
compiler who, according to Herodotus, lived in the sixth century
before Christ, in the tales of the Panchatantra and other
collections, the fox came to play the role of the trickster-hero
similar to the coyote, the great hare, and the master rabbit in
American Indian folktales. By the late twelfth century, a cycle of
stories with Reynard as the hero was widely disseminated in
western Europe. Like all trickster-heroes, he symbolized anarchy
against order, individualism against collectivism. In France,
where the beast epic was the most fully developed to satirize
feudal society, the name given to the hero even ousted goupil,
the common French word for "fox." Reynard represented
the most intelligent and resourceful of the common folk pitting
his wits against the barons, as represented by Ysengrim, the wolf.
His victories were the triumph of astuteness over brute force.
As early as the twelfth century Jacques de Vitry, abbot of
Oignes, speaking of confession without true repentance, indicated
a colloquial use of the Reynard stories: "Haec est confession
culpix, quae solet in Francia appelari confessio Renardi"
(this is the confession of the fox which it is customary to call
Reynard's confession in France). Illustrations of thea confession
can still be seen in many churches. Reynard, in the role of a
penitent, makes his confession wile carrying a fat chicken or duck
in a sack on his back.
Even more common is the depiction of the fox as a preacher.
In the garb of bishop with miter and crozier, of monk or friar, he
is represented as preaching to gullible ducks or chickens while
the unfortunate bird which will be his next meal peeps sadly over
his shoulder. Some representations show the fox reading to a
congregation of hens and surreptitiously strangling their cock at
the same time. There are also instances of two foxes: one, with
poultry already in his cowl is preaching to some birds while his
cowled vulpine confederate lies in wait behind the confessional
box. Similar satires on the clergy appear in the lyrics where the
false fox shrives the hens and gives them absolution. That the
figure was common in popular speech is suggested by its appearance
in the Towneley Mysteries: Cain, tired of the pious
warnings of his brother Abel, calls him a preaching fox.
More specific in reference and indicating currency of one
of the oldest tales about eh fox is the illustration of the fox
lying on its back, apparently dead, while fowls peck at it. What
might seem to be a reversal of fortunes in, in fact, only a ruse
to trap the birds. The fox feigning death is the Devil, and
it is depicted on a misericord at Chester, over the church doorway
at Alne, Yorkshire, and elsewhere. The engraving in the Physiologus
of Epiphanius shows four guineafowl flying to the attack while
three other fowl peck at the hairy, prostrate form, one inspecting
his open mouth, another his stomach, and the third his rear. The
accompanying text points the moral:
Nec aliter diabolus cum illaqueare
homieum vult,
tentat ipsum, ut quam negligenter se in
oratione gerat:
sicque facillime irretitur.
(Just as the Devil, wishing to entrap
men, tempts him so that he is careless in his speech and is thus
more easily caught.)
The Physiologus also stated that in the Scriptures
foxes symbolize heretics. Dante used the same symbolism in the Purgatorio
to indicate the heresies which threatened the early church.
Similarly, the fourteenth-century preacher John of Sheppey in his
tale of the foxes and the sheep observed that the foxes were falsi
religiousi. The foxes in Matthew viii.20, who were regarded as
fortunate in having holes, were heretics according to Rabanus
Maurus' more recently, the foxes running out of their holes on a
misericord at Worchester Cathedral have been interpreted by Evans
as types of the Devil: "Opposite this populous kennel is John
the Evangelist... The beholder is called upon to choose between the
wily adversary and the herald of divine truth." A similar
Scriptural interpretation was given in Pseudo-Hugo St. Victor's De
Bestiis. "Stinking vixen" was also a classic epithet
for heresy. Dante made use of it as a symbol for political heresy
in a Latin letter to Henry VII of Luxemburg in which he castigated
Florence.
The fox's outstretched tail appears to have symbolized
fraud itself. A Latin commentary on a twelfth-century Spanish Apocalypse
has an illustration of a fox, tail extended, running off with a
cock in its mouth. The theme is the same as Chaucer's Nun's
Priest's Tale. According to the text: Dum gallus canit
viribus, vulpis capit fraudibus & Fraudis causa tendit cauda
(while the cock eloquently sings, the fox takes it through guile
and its tail stretches out because of guile). Later, when a
foxtail becomes on of the badges of the motley, the secular
meaning is different: in Rabelais to fasten a foxtail on someone
is to make a mockery of him.
The Renaissance emblem writers made use of various fables.
Popular was Aesop's story of the fox who, unable to reach some
grapes, remarked the he did not want them anyway because they were
probably sour. Freitag, for example, provided the motto: ficta
eius quod habere nequit recusatio (feigned is the refusal of
that which cannot be had).
Whitney has two emblems in which the fox appears to
illustrate foresight rather than traditional craftiness. In one, a
boar whets his tusks on a tree while a fox watches. The moral is
"be prepared for the enemy- in pace de vello (in peace
or war). In another, a fox looks at a lion and gradually grows
less afraid of him- dura usu molliora (hard things become
softer with use). A further emblem indicates that the fox's wiles
do not defend it from mischance and shows a fox caught on a floe
by the breakup of ice- nullus dolus contra casum (no
strategy against bad luck). Camerarius, however, retains eh idea
of foresight: he shows a fox on the river bank testing the ice,
with the motto: fide, et diffide (trust and distrust). His
moral, that caution is necessary before undertaking any
enterprise, is repeated by Aldrovandi and others. Under the
caption intrepida scuritas (undaunted safety), Camerarius
also makes curious use of the belief that a pregnant fox is
scarcely ever captured by dogs. Here the fox is a symbol of the
man who is wise and circumspect in anticipating trouble.
Until the eighteenth century, fox-hunting was not an
exclusive sport of the aristocracy, nor did the hunting treatises
such as The Master of the Game rate the fox highly as a
beast of the chase. Foxes in the Middle Ages were vermin to be put
down in any season not so much with dogs but with clubs, traps, or
any other weapon to hand. Today, few of us have seen a fox except
in a zoo, and we hear little of the pursuit by the unspeakable of the
uneatable expect when animal lovers in England demonstrate against
the barbarity of the sport. Perhaps the last most distinctive
literary use of its symbolism is in D. H. Lawrenec's "The
Fox." Here, to the two girls trying to run an impoverished
farm, the fox preying on their fowls is untamed, predatory nature,
hostile to their way of living. The young soldier who intrudes on the
girls' lives is identified with the fox, and his killings are
inevitable, even ritualistic. He is the embodiment of what the fox
stands for: the essential ruthlessness of life.
Since the fox is no longer a common animal, it has tended
to disappear in proverbial phrase. Samuel Pepys, after a convivial
evening, could remark: "I drank so much wine that I was
almost foxed." The expression stemmed from the earlier phrase
"to flay of prick a fox," current also in France as ecorcher,
piquer un renard. It presumably referred to the fox's habit of
running in circles rather than in a straight line, a
characteristic which made Isidore of Seville, the Spanish
encyclopedist (circa 560-636), deduce that vulpis (fox)
came from voulpes (twisty-foot). The fox does remain in
proverbial phrase as an illustration of craftiness, but when we
use the common expression "sour grapes," we no longer
think of the fox nor of the Aesopian fable in which it
originated.
- from Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal
Symbolism by Beryl Rowland, pg. 76-80. University of
Tennessee Press 1973
