Cadfael
Brother Cadfael is the main fictional character in a series of historical murder mysteries written between 1977 and 1994 by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter under the name Ellis Peters.
Rather than wait to inherit the right to till a section of land, he left his home at the age of fourteen as servant to a wool-trader, and thus became acquainted with Shrewsbury early in life.
[11] In The Devil's Novice, Cadfael describes his life: I have seen death in many shapes, I've been a soldier and a sailor in my time; in the east, in the Crusade, and for ten years after Jerusalem fell.
In the stories, Brother Cadfael regularly disobeys the heads of his abbey, acts to bring about his own sense of compassionate justice (sometimes against church or feudal law), and does not condemn relationships outside wedlock.
Both Abbot Heribert and his successor Radulfus recognise Cadfael's unusual skills garnered from a long life as soldier, herbalist, sailor, and traveller.
Abbot Radulfus, who is himself a shrewd and worldly man, allows Cadfael a certain degree of independence and appreciates that there are circumstances under which the rules of the Order must be bent to serve a greater and more practical good.
After Cadfael takes vows, he has a close affection for at least two young women: Sioned, the daughter of a Welsh lord (A Morbid Taste for Bones), and Godith Adeney (One Corpse Too Many).
He also enjoys a platonic friendship with the equally worldly Benedictine nun, Sister Magdalen (formerly Avice of Thornbury) of the nunnery close by at Godric's Ford (The Leper of St. Giles, Dead Man's Ransom, The Rose Rent).
[13] Based on this praise, Daoud decides to embrace his father's Christianity rather than his mother's Islamic faith, and takes the name of his godfather at baptism, Olivier de Bretagne.
Olivier is presented as the gracious knight and paladin: skilled and brave in battle, 'fiercely beautiful', resourceful, resilient, generous and chivalrous; he risks his life to save an enemy who had been keeping him imprisoned in a dungeon (Brother Cadfael's Penance).
[14] In The Pilgrim of Hate he is described as having "a long, spare wide-browed face, with a fine scimitar of a nose and a subtle bow of a mouth and the fierce, fearless, golden eyes of a hawk.
He also has a special affection for the martyred maiden Saint Winifred who lies at the centre of the first book in the series, A Morbid Taste for Bones, (this novel became first of a series only when the second novel relied on Cadfael as the central character),[16] in which Cadfael takes part in an expedition to Wales to excavate the saint's bones and bring them to the Abbey in England, establishing it as a pilgrimage site of healing relics.
Later recalling the event Cadfael says: "It was I who took her from the soil and I who restored her – and still that makes me glad – from the moment I uncovered those slender bones, I felt in mine that they only wished to be left in peace [...] the girl was Welsh, like me".
[17] Through the series he petitions her for help and talks with her in Welsh, as a down to earth steward of the common people, more accessible than a remote and mysterious God, a local channel of healing and benediction, and though after being miraculously resurrected she in fact lived to a ripe old age, Cadfael always calls her "The Girl".
The looser structure, run at the discretion of the abbot, would suit well a man like Cadfael who was in the secular world for forty years before entering the order.
[23] He favours a simple, tolerant and forgiving understanding of Christianity, his practice tending to be based on experience of human frailty rather than contemplation of religious texts.
[24] When Shrewsbury is visited by an Inquisition-style orthodoxy (The Heretic’s Apprentice) or a harshly punitive version of Christianity (The Raven in the Foregate), the stories end with a reaffirmation of the positive, tolerant faith espoused by Cadfael.
The "anxious sweetness" of the fictional Abbot Heribert is set against the proud and ambitious Prior Robert, who Kollman argues "almost becomes the true villain of the series".
He moves easily among the Welsh and the English, speaking both languages, with freemen and villeins, with rich and poor burghers, with members of the low and high aristocracy, within the tribal and feudal communities, church hierarchies and secular; he talks freely with kings and princes.
Cadfael is on good terms with people on both sides of the English war; his best friend Hugh is a staunch supporter of King Stephen, and his son Olivier is just as much committed to the Empress Maud.
Cadfael likes to speak in Welsh, is exuberant when getting an opportunity to go back into Wales, and feels closer to many Welsh ways of doing things than Anglo-Norman ways: for example, letting all of a man's acknowledged children, whether born in or out of wedlock, share in his inheritance; and recognising degrees of crime, including homicide, which allows leniency to killers in certain circumstances, rather than the inflexibly mandatory capital punishment of Norman Law, administered reluctantly by Hugh Beringar and rigidly by his superior, Sheriff Gilbert Prestcote.
Cadfael has, however, voluntarily chosen to join an English monastery rather than a Welsh one, and make his home in England – although close to the borders with Wales – his secular history having made him too cosmopolitan to blend in his own homeland.
