In English folklore, Reynardine is a werefox who attracts beautiful women to him so that he can take them away to his castle. What fate meets them there is usually left ambiguous in the ballads in which the character appears.
The song appears in George Petrie's 1855 collection of ballads; other variants appear in a number of broadside ballads from the nineteenth century. Washington Irving relates that the song had crossed the Atlantic and was being sung in Kentucky before 1832, and spread through North America in the nineteenth century as well. Since renard is French for "fox", and the fox frequently appears in anthropomorphic fables in France, a French origin for the story has been suggested.
A versions of the song are performed on the albums Liege and Lief by Fairport Convention and Weaving my Ancestors' Voices by Sheila Chandra .
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