fabliau

fabliau,
a short tale in verse, almost invariably in octosyllabic couplets in French, dealing for the most part from a comic point of view with incidents of ordinary life. The fabliau was an important element in French poetry in the 12th–13th cents. In English, it has come to be applied loosely to tales with a sexual element, such as Chaucer's tales of the Miller, the Summoner, and the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales . See J. Hines , The Fabliau in English ( 1993 ), and P. Nykrog , Les Fabliaux ( 1973 ).