The Fuller and the Charcoal Burner

The fuller (or cloth cleaner) and the charcoal burner (or collier) is one of Aesop's Fables and numbered 29 in the Perry Index.

[3] Cicero later seems to draw a political moral from the fable in one of his letters, in which he discusses the irreconcilability between republicans and supporters of Julius Caesar.

[4] And in the Victorian era, the preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon applied what he called "the well-worn fable" to religious difference.

[5] In Renaissance times there were 16th century poetic versions of the fable in Neo-Latin by Gabriele Faerno[6] and by Hieronymus Osius.

[7] The latter concludes with the sentiment that An English version of the story appeared in the 1692 fable collection of Roger L'Estrange with the very broad application that "Tis a necessary Rule in Alliances, Matches, Societies, Fraternities, Friendships, Partnerships, Commerce, and all manner of civil dealings and Contracts, to have a strict Regard to Humour, the Nature, and the Disposition of those we have to do withal.