The Fox, the Wolf and the Husbandman

Dunfermline Abbey from a 17th-century engraving. Robert Henryson, author of The Morall Fabillis, was associated with the place.

The Fox, the Wolf and the Husbandman is a poem by the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson and part of his collection of moral fables known as the Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian. It is written in Middle Scots. As with the other tales in the collection, appended to it is a moralitas which elaborates on the moral that the fable is supposed to contain. However, the appropriateness of the moralitas for the tale itself has been questioned.

The tale combines two motifs. Firstly, a husbandman tilling the fields with his new oxen makes a rash oath aloud to give them to the wolf; when the wolf overhears this, he attempts to make sure that the man fulfills his promise. 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. The moralitas connects the wolf to the wicked man, the fox to the devil, and the husbandman to the godly man. A probable source for the tale is Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina Clericalis, containing the same motifs, and William Caxton's Aesop's Fables—though the tale is a beast fable, not Aesopic.