The Fox, the Wolf and the Husbandman

The fox mediates a solution by speaking to them individually; eventually he fools the wolf into following him to claim his supposed reward for dropping the case, and tricks him into a draw-well.

[1] However, the discussion of legality and the questioning of language that take place alongside these motifs are entirely Henryson's invention.

Whereas the moral of Alfonsi's tale explains that the wolf lost both the oxen and the cheese because he "relinquished what was present for what was to come" (Latin: pro futuro quod presens erat dimisit), Henryson's moralitas more fully involves the husbandman.

[3] The plots of such works are more complicated than their Aesopic counterpart, tend more towards ribaldry, and feature the fox making a victim of the wolf.

Eventually, as the wolf complains of the fruitlessness of their quest, they arrive at a draw-well with buckets on each end of a rope.

Seeing the reflection of the moon in the water at the bottom of the well, the wolf believes there to be cheese down there and lowers the fox down to pick it up.

Lianne Farber highlights a number of these discrepancies, and says that the allegory "does not hold true in any traditional sense".

[2] Amongst the inconsistencies is that the fox, not the wolf, is the figure that argues with and finds fault in the husbandman; the "woods of the world" are not traversed by the husbandman, in spite of the moralitas suggesting it is applicable to all men; Farber argues that even assuming the moral to be true is problematic, since it apparently suggests that the godly man must bribe the figure of the judge, and that this does not affect his godly status.

[6] The cheese that apparently resides in the well is only an illusion, not a solid object, and similarly the fox creates a surface reconciliation between the wolf and the husbandman, but which betrays his real intentions.