The Versus de unibove, also known as Unibos, Einochs or One-Ox, is a Latin poem in 864 lines that recounts the comic story of a poor farmer known as Unibos, or 'One-Ox', who stumbles across a buried treasure. [1]
The poem survives only in one eleventh-century manuscript, now held in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels, with the shelfmark MS 10078-95. This manuscript, which also contains astronomical and other educational texts, was written in the monastery of Gembloux. [2]
The Latin poem is generally thought to be the written version of an older oral story. [3] Later versions of the same story were collected by the Brothers Grimm, and folklorists have categorised it as an example of 'The Little Peasant' tale. [2]
The poem has been analysed in different ways: as a peasant folktale, [4] as an early example of a fabliau, [1] and as evidence for commercialisation. [5]
La beffa di Unibos, ed. Ferruccio Bertini and Francesco Mosetti Casaretto (2000)
Marc Wolterbeek, 'Unibos: the earliest full-length fabliau (text and translation)', Comitatus, 16, (1985), 46-76
Jan Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales From Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012)
Archives de litterature du Moyen Age, https://www.arlima.net/uz/unibos.html