In setting out on a search for performances of the Old French comic fabliaux, this essay begins neither in the town marketplace, nor in the higher social surroundings of manor house or castle hall, but in the pulpit. Paradoxically, and with an irony that would not have been lost on the professional conteors themselves (so often ready to close their stories with a mock-homily), some of the most direct evidence that we possess of the fabliaux's performance potential comes from the artes prædicandi [arts of preaching]. Throughout the various collections of exempla, which bear full witness to the practical eclecticism of the medieval sermon, are to be found a number of recognisable fabliaux or fabliaux analogues.

The case of Jacques de Vitry (whose sermons are datable to c.1228–40) is a particularly informative (and formative) one, since he takes great care to tailor his material to his audience. In contrast to his Sermones feriales et communes [Sermons for Feasts and Ordinary Days] (aimed at fellow-clergy at a time when Cathar heresy had to be countered by orthodoxy and spirituality), his Sermones vulgares [Sermons to the Laity] are directed at the wider lay public and its human failings. The anecdotes of this latter group are just as cunningly chosen, but from a far more popular domain.

It is surely no coincidence that the period of a hundred years, from Jacques de Vitry to the Anglo-Norman minorite Nicolas Bozon who enthusiastically reworked exemplary anecdotes into vernacular narrative form, is also that of the heyday of the fabliaux. The cardinal-bishop of Tusculum and the preaching friars would be disseminating the same stories at the same time as the jongleurs, and effectively to the same wide audience, who would recognise them and pay attention. Surroundings and intent may have been different, but the telling of the tales themselves would have called upon common performing skills.