Category: Beast Fables

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Medieval Golden Goose Fables: Eggs, Greed, and Demanding Too Much

Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig XV 2, f. 25v.

In the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs (Perry Index 87), the titular bird is killed by her foolish owner. This fable warns against seeking great, immediate gain over more modest, long-term gain—particularly when doing the former destroys a valuable, otherwise sustainable resource. The first extant version of this fable is that of Avianus, ca. 400 CE; earlier versions may have featured a hen rather than a goose, as fable scholar Francisco Rodríguez Adrados has argued on metrical grounds.1 But in Avianus, the creature is a goose, and so the tale was transmitted through the Middle Ages and beyond, becoming essentially proverbial.

As is the case with fable in general, medieval versions of The Goose with the Golden Eggs aim at providing a moral lesson to humans through a memorable extended metaphor. The plight of the bird who is killed in this story is not supposed to be the point. Nevertheless, below, I consider the real creatures behind the unrealistic analogy. Can we read the fable somewhat more subversively, as an admonition about the dangers of pushing animals beyond their physical limits?

British Library, Additional MS 42130 (The Luttrell Psalter), f. 166v.

Medieval and Modern Poultry

Chickens have long been kept for their eggs, at least as much as for their meat. Domestic geese, on the other hand, were valued in the Middle Ages mostly for their meat and feathers.2 Their flight feathers were used for quill pens and arrow fletching, amongst other things, while their down was used for insulation.3 When goose eggs did go on the market in the Middle Ages, though, they could be several times more expensive than hen eggs.4 Goose eggs are harder to come by; geese lay fewer eggs than chickens, and their strong pair-bonds make it infeasible to keep a flock with a very large ratio of laying females to males.5 Domestic geese nowadays might lay between 10 and 40 eggs a year, with the yield likely being somewhat lower than this in the Middle Ages;6 a medieval hen, however, might have laid as many as 100 eggs a year, or even more, “not far behind the level attained in the early twentieth century.”7

While domestic geese are still bred and raised for the resources their bodies provide, it is now predominantly chickens, “the most scientifically engineered of livestock,”8 whose eggs are the basis of an industry worth billions. A chicken bred for egg production can lay 300 eggs a year9—triple the rate of medieval chickens, or even early twenty-first century chickens. This high lay rate may be a cause for osteoporosis in the birds, exacerbated further by their inactivity when kept in “conventional” cages.10

The majority of the over 300 million “commercial laying hens” in the United States are housed in “conventional cage environments,” also known as battery farms. These birds are confined exclusively indoors, in tiers of stacked wire cages, several individuals in each cage, with eggs and waste collected via conveyor belts.11 This “convention” has only been widely implemented since the 1950s.12 Such systems were famously criticized by Ruth Harrison in an influential 1964 book, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry,13 and since then, “factory farming” has only become further entrenched as a normative practice. In 2009, about 95% of commercial laying hens in the US were in “conventional” cages.14 That percentage has dropped to around 66% as of 2022,15 and is continuing to drop; battery cages were outlawed in the European Union in 2012, and are being outlawed in a growing number of US states, because of animal welfare concerns.

Bibliothèque Municipale de Chalon-sur-Saône, MS 14, f. 67v.

Medieval Fables of Golden Geese

Medieval versions of the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs imagine that there are firm natural limits to the bird’s production of precious gold eggs, which cannot be exceeded. “Nature had fixed this law for the magnificent bird, that she was not permitted to bear two gifts at the same time,” says Avianus’s Latin verse version (fixerat hanc volucri legem Natura superbae, / ne liceat pariter munera ferre duo, lines 3-4).16 In Avianus’s telling, the goose’s owner is portrayed as impatient and calculating—he is concerned that the “gifts” won’t last and eager to maximize profit from her body:

sed dominus, cupidum sperans vanescere votum,
non tulit exosas in sua lucra moras,
grande ratus pretium volucris de morte referre,
quae tam continuo munere dives erat. (lines 5–8)

(But the master, expecting the greedy offering to disappear, did not endure odious delays to his profits, and thought to withdraw from the death of the bird great value, who had been so continuously rich with gifts).

Upon killing the bird and finding her body devoid of treasure, he considers himself deservedly punished by the gods for his own avarice; the fable’s moral concludes:

sic qui cuncta deos uno male tempore poscunt,
iustius his etiam vota diurna negant. (lines 13–14)

(So, to those who wrongly demand from the gods everything at once, they deny even daily prayers more justly.)

A late medieval Middle English prose version of the fable, in William Caxton’s Aesop (1484), tells the story somewhat differently: the goose’s greedy owner verbally commands her to lay two eggs a day instead of one, and kills her, out of anger, when she protests that she can’t. Caxton’s moral is less pithy, but still expresses the sentiment that the man has only hurt his own interests by killing the goose.

The man of auaryce or couetousnes commaunded and bad to her/ that euery daye she shold leye two egges/ And she sayd to hym/ Certaynly/ my mayster I maye not/ wherfore the man was wrothe with her/ and slewe her/ wherfore he lost that same grete good/ of the whiche dede he was moche sorowful and wrothe/ how be it that it was not tyme to shette the stable whan the horses ben loste/ & gone/ And he is not wyse/ whiche dothe suche a thinge/ wherof he shalle repente hym afterward/ ne he also/ whiche doth his owne dommage for to auenge hym self on somme other/ For by cause that he supposeth to wynne al/ he leseth all that he hath17

(The man, out of avarice or covetousness, commanded and ordered that every day she must lay two eggs. And she said to him, “Truly, my master, I cannot,” and so the man was angry with her and killed her, and so he lost that same great benefit, of which deed he was very sad and angry. Nevertheless, it is too late to shut the stable when the horses are lost and gone, and he is not wise who does something that he will regret afterward, nor is he wise who does himself harm to avenge himself on someone else. For, because he intends to gain everything, he loses all that he has.)

Authors like Avianus and Caxton did not foresee the drastic “improvements” that domesticated birds would undergo through breeding, or the battery farms that would house them nearly immobile in tiny cages, with the aim of maximizing profit. “Today,” says Margaret E. Derry, “we use chickens in a more mechanistic way than all other farm livestock. We follow practices that are not good for the birds and do not necessarily reflect well on us, in spite of the obvious benefits of such practices” (i.e., cheap eggs for human consumption).18 The morals to the two medieval versions of The Goose with the Golden Eggs that I considered above ultimately frame the bird’s violent demise in terms of how this impacts the human killer financially; we are encouraged to view the slaughter as, above all, unwise, because the goose was profitable to her owner, rather than as an act of cruelty or injustice toward the victim. But despite these mercenary morals, the fables’ authors nevertheless presciently suggest that human greed can demand more of animals than they can provide us, and that this is destructive, to them and to us.

  1. Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable (Brill, 2003), vol. 3, p. 113. ↩︎
  2. Philip Slavin, “Goose management and rearing in late medieval eastern England, c.1250–1400,” The Agricultural History Review, vol. 58, no. 1 (2010), p. 4. ↩︎
  3. Dale Serjeantson, “Goose husbandry in Medieval England, and the problem of ageing goose bones,” Acta zoologica cracoviensia, vol. 45 (2002), p. 43. ↩︎
  4. Slavin, “Goose management and rearing,” p. 8. ↩︎
  5. Serjeantson, “Goose husbandry in Medieval England,” p. 41. ↩︎
  6. Slavin, “Goose management and rearing,” p. 16. ↩︎
  7. D. J. Stone, “The Consumption and Supply of Birds in Late Medieval England,” in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 154. ↩︎
  8. Margaret E. Derry, Art and Science in Breeding: Creating Better Chickens (University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 4. ↩︎
  9. United Egg Producers, “Facts & Stats,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  10. C. C. Whitehead et al., “Osteoporosis in cage layers,” Poultry Science, vol. 79, 7 (2000), 1033–1041; A. B. Webster, “Welfare implications of avian osteoporosis,” Poultry Science, vol. 83, 2 (2004): 184–92. ↩︎
  11. United Egg Producers, “Hen Housing Diagrams,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  12. B. Yilmaz Dikmen et al., “Egg production and welfare of laying hens kept in different housing systems (conventional, enriched cage, and free range),” Poultry Science, vol. 95, 7 (2016), p. 1564. ↩︎
  13. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (Vincent Stuart Publishers, 1964). Reprinted with new commentaries 2013 by CAB International. ↩︎
  14. Sara Shields and Ian J. H. Duncan., “A Comparison of the Welfare of Hens in Battery Cages and Alternative Systems” (2009), Impacts on Farm Animals 18, WellBeing International, accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  15. United Egg Producers, “Facts & Stats,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  16. Latin text from J. Wright Duff and A. M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets, Volume II: Florus, Hadrian, Nemesianus, Reposianus, Tiberianus, Dicta Catonis, Phoenix, Avianus, Rutilius Namatianus, Others, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 732. All modern English translations in this post are my own. ↩︎
  17. Middle English text from R. T. Lenaghan, ed., Caxton’s Aesop, Edited with an Introduction and Notes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 190. ↩︎
  18. Derry, Art and Science in Breeding, p. 9. ↩︎
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“Dressing Up”: Medieval Fables, Fashion, and Social Instability

Woodcut of The Ass and the Lion Skin, from a 1479 incunabulum of Heinrich Steinhöwel’s Fables of Aesop

The tradition of dressing in costumes for Halloween is relatively recent, and regionally limited as well. Such costumes are not intended to convince anyone that they are genuine—no one is supposed to think the person dressing up is really a witch, a superhero, etc.—nor are they meant to be worn for more than an evening. No doubt much of the appeal of Halloween costumes is in how they allow us to playfully assume and express a new, temporary identity. In honor of Halloween, I’d like to consider medieval fables about animals who assume a new identity by “dressing up” as another species. These fables all attempt to promulgate the message that one’s identity cannot be changed, and that trying only leads to disaster. Read against the grain, however, such stories in fact reveal that human identity is unlike species difference—that our identities are mutable and contextual, and that this is a source of anxiety for those invested in social hierarchies.

I can think of at least four fables where an animal uses another animal’s skin (or feathers) to represent themselves as a different species. These fables include The Ass and the Lion’s Skin (Perry Index 188/358); The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (Perry Index 705); The Rook among the Peacocks (Perry Index 472); and The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (Perry Index 451). The animals’ motivations differ, but in attempting to take up their new role, they start to behave differently than before as well. In the first three fables mentioned, the disguised animal aims to represent themselves as “better” than they really are—stronger, more intimidating, more beautiful—and begins to not only look but act the part. By “dressing up” they are trying to move up as well, in a sense.

Woodcut of The Rook and the Peacock, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The donkey in The Ass and the Lion Skin runs around frightening other livestock in his lion pelt; the sheep in The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram dons the skin of his master’s deceased sheepdog and aggressively pursues the wolf who would harm his flockmates; and the rook adorns himself with peacock feathers and joins the peacocks, strutting around proudly. In The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (known in proverb form as the “wolf in sheep’s clothing”), the wolf’s intentions are more sinister, as he feigns harmlessness in order to insinuate himself amongst his would-be victims, before he is slaughtered for dinner by the unwitting shepherd. The other three fables conclude with the animals being recognized for what they “really” are, and then hurt or killed as a consequence.

The morals of these medieval fables often draw comparisons between species and social position, particularly class—you shouldn’t aim at too much upward mobility, or wish for what others have, lest it backfire, with you ending up in a worse position than before. For example, the moral to late medieval Scottish poet Robert Henryson’s version of The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (The Wolf and the Wether) asserts:

Heir may thow se that riches of array
Will cause pure men presumpteous for to be;
Thay think thay hald of nane, be thay als gay,
Bot counterfute ane lord in all degre.
Out of thair cais in pryde thay clym sa hie
That thay forbeir thair better in na steid
Quhill sum man tit thair heillis ouer thair heid… (lines 2595–2601)

Thairfoir I counsell men of everilk stait
To knaw thame self and quhome thay suld forbeir,
And fall not with thair better in debait,
Suppois thay be als galland in thair geir:
It settis na seruand for to vphald weir,
Nor clym sa hie quhill he fall off the ledder:
Bot think vpon the wolf and on the wedder. (lines 2609–2616)1

Here you can see that rich attire will cause poor men to be arrogant; they think they have no superior, if they are dressed as fine, but they imitate a lord in every way. Out of their condition, in pride, they climb so high that they don’t refrain anywhere from injuring their superiors, until someone tips their heels over their heads…

Therefore, I advise men of every rank to know themselves and whom they should refrain from injuring, and fall not into contention with their superior, even if they are as stylish in their dress: it suits no servant to keep up strife, nor to climb so high that he falls off the ladder: just think of the wolf and of the wether.

Woodcut of The Wolf and the Wether, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The narrator’s “counsell” did not just reflect a private opinion. From 1429/30, James I had imposed sumptuary legislation in Scotland, which limited expensive textiles such as silks and some kinds of furs to upper social strata.2 Such legislation was not exclusive to late medieval Scotland, but could be found in many regions across the world, through the eighteenth century.3 “In the case of medieval and early modern Europe,” says historian Lorraine Daston, “over a period of five hundred years (c. 1200–1800), these regulations not only failed to stamp out excess (or what might now be called conspicuous consumption), they arguably exacerbated the very ills they were meant to remedy.” In other words, not only did people not abide by these regulations, the regulations themselves could spur a sort of sartorial “arms race,” inspiring clothesmakers to come up with novel extravagances that were not yet forbidden,4 and consumers to keep up with the newest fashions.

Clothing can visually signify so many aspects of identity (such as class, gender, occupation, religion, and political affiliations), yet the details are inconstant over time and from one place to the next, and clothing can easily be taken on and off. The abovementioned fables, admonitory as they are, express unease with the instability of human social categories as expressed through clothing. Fables often map social hierarchy onto species, and in doing so, they suggest that there is something “natural,” something immutable, about these hierarchies—that a poor man and a lord are as distinct from one another as a sheep and a dog, or a rook and a peacock. But if these hierarchies were really so natural and immutable, the fables wouldn’t have cautionary morals that tell people not to “forget their place.” There would be no need for the admonition, just as there would be no impetus to create (and update) sumptuary regulations, were it not for people constantly breaking boundaries in their fashion choices.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Denton Fox, ed., The Poems of Robert Henryson (Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 96–7. Modern English translations are my own. ↩︎
  2. Maria Hayward, “‘Outlandish Superfluities’: Luxury and Clothing in Scottish and English Sumptuary Law from the Fourteenth through the Seventeenth Century,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 97. ↩︎
  3. For a global history of sumptuary legislation, see The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack. ↩︎
  4. Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 156. ↩︎

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The Raven’s False Greeting: Animal Language and Medieval Fable

Talking animals are a ubiquitous element in fables. They do not evoke wonder from human characters within the narrative, nor seem to require any explanation; this contrasts with other sorts of stories (everything from Marie de France’s Guigemar to contemporary fantasy novels) where the appearance of a talking animal signals the beginning of some rare adventure for humans. Notably, there is, however, one fable I can think of that seems to portray an animal whose ability to talk is liminal. That is, he can utter words, yet he is not really treated as a speaker. His status seems closer to that of a “real” animal who can mimic human speech, and that is in fact key to the story.

The fable in question is ascribed to Phaedrus, the author of the first extant literary fable collection. While Phaedrus wrote in the first century, his five books of fables were the basis for much of the “Romulus” tradition in prose and verse, which flourished in the Middle Ages. The aforementioned fable is called “The Traveler and the Raven” (Viator et corvus). The tale is found in “Perotti’s Appendix,” named for the Italian humanist, Niccolò Perotti (1429–80), who transmitted it; I offer a translation of it below, with the text based on Ben Edwin Perry’s edition.[1]

Manuscript illustration, from the 14th century Luttrell Psalter, of two humans and a horse harrowing a field, with two ravens hovering above them, British Library, Additional MS 42130, fol. 171r .

Quidam per agros devium carpens iter
AVE exaudivit, et moratus paululum,
adesse ut vidit nullum, corripuit gradum.
iterum salutat idem ex occulto sonus.
voce hospitali confirmatus restitit,
ut, quisquis esset, par officium reciperet.
cum circumspectans errore haesisset diu
et perdidisset tempus aliquot milium,
ostendit sese corvus et supervolans
AVE usque ingessit. tum se lusum intelligens
“At male tibi sit” inquit, “ales pessime,
qui festinantis sic detinuisti pedes.”

A certain man, taking a byway through the fields on a journey, heard “Hello!” and lingered for a moment, but when he saw that no one was there, he hastened the pace. Again, the same sound greeted him from some hidden place. He stopped, encouraged by the hospitable voice, so that whoever it was might receive an equal courtesy. When he had remained for a long time, looking around uncertainly, and lost enough time for several miles, a raven showed himself, and flying above him, incessantly repeated “Hello!” Then, realizing he had been tricked, the man said, “Damn you, wretched bird, for delaying my feet like that when I was in a hurry.”

Why did the man perceive the raven’s “hello” as a trick? (The word lusum, in line 10, comes from ludo, to play, and can suggest mockery or deception; I translated it as “tricked.”) Why did he not take this as a genuine greeting?

It seems that the man was expecting a human speaker, and was disappointed and annoyed to find out that the salutation came from a bird instead. But species difference doesn’t, in and of itself, seem like an adequate explanation, at least in the usual fable context where all sorts of creatures talk. Nor does the explanation for the man’s reaction lie in some perceived status imbalance between the two; reciprocity is expected in greetings, after all, even between parties of unequal standing, and it isn’t mockery for an inferior to greet a superior, or vice versa.

Complicating this is the fact that real birds can imitate human speech—parrots, most famously, but also corvids, including ravens. This raven repeats the same simple word, over and over, as a trained animal might. But the man simultaneously seems to impute malice or mischief to this animal and deny him as a legitimate interlocutor. The raven is capable of toying with him (and ravens have a longstanding, cross-cultural reputation for cleverness and tricks), but he is not capable of (or worthy of?) a conversation.

Manuscript illustration of a raven, from an early 14th century manuscript of Jacob van Maerlant’s Der Naturen Bloeme, British Library, Additional MS 11390, fol. 33r.

A traditional narrative about animal language is that it doesn’t exist—that the sounds that animals make (and this leaves aside non-aural communication, through movement, scent, etc.) are fundamentally different than human speech. Nonetheless, medieval grammarians and philosophers acknowledged that, say, a dog’s bark is not meaningless, that it might convey something of his emotional state, and that humans could pick up on this.[2] Some thinkers, too, suggested that animals can communicate with their own species in their own “language.” For example, says, Roger Bacon, hens can cluck to let their young know that food is near, or to warn them of a predator.[3]

So much for “real-life” animal language. In medieval literature, though, there may also be special talking animals (or humans gifted with a special ability to understand animals, e.g., the man who can translate between species in Culhwch and Olwen, or Canacee, with her magic ring, in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”). In fables, animals’ capacity to speak is typically unremarkable, and conversations readily occur across species lines.

This fable, however, reflects none of the above scenarios. The raven doesn’t caw or croak—he says an intelligible word, in a human language, Latin. And what he says is “Ave,” a greeting. Ave is not far off from Latin avis, “bird,” although the words are etymologically unrelated; in modern Spanish and Portuguese ave means “bird”. Etymology aside, there is still the possibility of wordplay. Is the bird proclaiming what he is all along, without the man realizing it? Is that the “trick”? Was that what the bird really meant to do, or was it apt, but not necessarily done knowingly—is the raven a kind of natural sign who reiterates himself, both by appearing and by unwittingly speaking his own appearance?

In any case, the man doesn’t treat the raven’s “Ave” as a sincere speech-act from an animal who can, unsurprisingly, talk to him—he doesn’t treat it as a greeting, he treats it as a deception. (The opening moral, possibly added by Perotti, emphasizes this, declaring, “People are very often deceived by words,” Verbis saepenumero homines decipi solere).

What accounts for the man’s reaction to the raven? Fables often have talking animals, yes, but fundamentally, fables are didactic, using memorable narratives to get messages across. The raven’s real-life reputation for mischief, but above all his real-life ability to imitate speech, is what is being drawn on here. The raven in “The Traveler and the Raven” is not the genre-typical talking animal, because for him to be an actual, expected interlocutor goes against the point of the fable, which is about how words can deceive.[4] In conveying this point, “The Traveler and the Raven” both acknowledges certain animals as clever and strips a non-human character of his genre-typical linguistic capability.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] Ben Edwin Perry, ed. and trans., Babrius and Phaedrus, Loeb Classical Library 436 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 404–6.

[2] For an analysis of the shifting conceptions of the semiotics of dogs’ barking, from Aristotle to Roger Bacon, see Umberto Eco et al., “On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs,” in On the Medieval Theory of Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989), pp. 3–41.

[3] Quoted in Eco et al., “On Animal Language,” p. 36, n. 39.

[4] Fables tend to teach the “mistrust of words,” argues Jill Mann, in From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 96.