The reader can infer that there is both humour and reassurance to be found in natura, who, as Bartholomew mentions in Book 18, citing Pliny, makes marvellous beasts to entertain and astonish us.^[58] In Book 17, playing on the word virga (rod or twig), Bartholomew links the ideas of florescence and of the Incarnation, a rhetorical device favoured by the Benedictine abbess and poetess Hildegard of Bingen a century earlier.^[59] This wordplay reveals Bartholomew’s use of literary concepts available in his time and place, but he concludes the chapter with a touch of punning humour and bathos: ‘At the same time the rod is hateful to dogs and little boys, because it restrains their bad behaviour.’^[60] Another example of his populist touch occurs in his references to the fox in Book 18 and elsewhere. Hassig discusses the array of significations that the image of the bestiary fox could carry, derived from scripture, folklore and daily life: sly hypocrisy, the guile of the devil seeking souls to devour; heresy.^[61] Bartholomew's fox in Book 18 is derived from several sources, including scripture, the bestiary and folklore. In De Vulpe, Bartholomew reiterates the bestiary descriptions of the fox’s crooked gait and untrustworthy ways, but also alludes to popular comic stories about the fox current at his time, recalling that the fox is helped by his friend the stag in his quarrel with the badger. In his chapter on the badger, Bartholomew evokes in a few words a vignette of the animal as a careful householder mindful of his stores, bothered by his greedy wife on one hand and by his impudent neighbour the fox on the other. Fox and badger are nevertheless allied in that they both live in dens and use their hairy coats to protect them against hounds.^[62] In these two chapters Bartholomew is apparently alluding to the characters of fox, badger and stag from the Roman de Renard, making use of an existing bit of the popular tradition as it existed in his time and place that could engage both readers and sermon audiences.^[63] In these examples Bartholomew seems to acknowledge that study, like other forms of labour, can be arduous and that the reader, like the music-loving ox, works better with a bit of cheerful encouragement. The glossator, however, sternly reminds the reader of the fox's connotations of hypocrisy, heresy, greed and guile: ‘Take note of the cunning and hypocritical; of entrapments; against the gluttonous.’^[64]