Dame Siriþ is the only known English fabliau outside Chaucer's works. It uniquely occurs at folios 165 recto 168 recto of Digby 86, where it is preceded by a Latin text on truths and followed by an English charm listing 77 names for a hare. It appears that the text originally part of a separate booklet inserted into its current place in the manuscript when the volume was bound. Dame Siriþ is based on a traditional story that has analogue in a number of different languages and that might ultimately have been oriental in origin.
As a fabliaux (fablel, 'little story' in the manuscript title), it is bawdy, and the action revolves around a trick (or cointise, 'strategem') played upon one of the characters, an illicit love interest, localized action, and non-aristocratic protagonists. As Bennett and Grey point out, there is very little narrative description in the text; instead, its dynamic is dialogue.
Dame Siriþ might have been performed orally by a poet reading the different roles in a variety of voices with identifiable props; in some ways, then, it could be considered as a proto-dramatic text. This text is written in tailrhyme stanzas, made up of three- or four-beat lines. In the earlier part of the manuscript text, letters placed in the margin indicate a change of speaker in the text; these are the produced Testator (T), Clericus (C), Uxor (U) and Femina (F), representing the narrator, Wilekin, Margery and Dame Siriþ respectively.