Literature / Brother Cadfael

A series of historical mysteries by Ellis Peters, comprising 20 novels and 3 short stories, published 1977-1994.

Brother Cadfael is the herbalist of a Benedictine monastery in 12th-century Shrewsbury. He is a former soldier who became a monk in later life and consequently has a more worldly outlook than many of his colleagues.

Inspired the 1990s TV series Cadfael, with Derek Jacobi in the title role. The BBC has adapted five of the books for radio, the first two with Glyn Houston as Cadfael and three more with Philip Madoc.

Books in this series

• A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977)
• One Corpse Too Many (1979)
• Monk's Hood (1980)
• Saint Peter's Fair (1981)
• The Leper of Saint Giles (1981)
• The Virgin in the Ice (1982)
• The Sanctuary Sparrow (1983)
• The Devil's Novice (1983)
• Dead Man's Ransom (1984)
• The Pilgrim of Hate (1984)
• An Excellent Mystery (1985)
• The Raven in the Foregate (1986)
• The Rose Rent (1986)
• The Hermit of Eyton Forest (1988)
• The Confession of Brother Haluin (1988)
• A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael (1988). Short story collection. The first story takes place almost two decades prior to the original Cadfael novel.
  • A Light on the Road to Woodstock
  • The Price of Light
  • Eye Witness
• The Heretic's Apprentice (1990)
• The Potter's Field (1990)
• The Summer of the Danes (1991)
• The Holy Thief (1992)
• Brother Cadfael's Penance (1994)

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This series provides examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny: At the end of One Corpse Too Many, Cadfael has been Out-Gambitted by Hugh Beringar, who tries to gloat as gently as possible. When it turns out that Cadfael was in fact out-gambitting him, Hugh's response is to break down in hysterical laughter over his own preening not moments ago. It helps that both men had the same goals in mind - to wit, to get Godith Adeney to safety, as she was not fair game, while sparring over the treasure, which was.
• Affably Evil: Janyn Linde in The Devil's Novice; Cadfael notes that murder comes as easily to him as smiling, and often as not he does the one while doing the other.
• Amateur Sleuth: Cadfael. Of course, at that time, there weren't any professional ones.
• Arranged Marriage:
  • In One Corpse Too Many: Hugh Beringar and his betrothed are on opposite sides of a civil war; she is trying to escape from Shropshire and the marriage, while he is trying to find her.
  • The Leper of St. Giles: A beautiful young heiress has been forcibly betrothed to a much older baron by her abusive guardians. They know about the handsome young squire who loves her, but they don't know that her long lost grandfather is hovering nearby, determined to see his grandchild happy.
  • The Devil's Novice: Meriet Aspley's elder brother is about to conclude an Arranged Marriage contract with a neighbouring landowner's daughter, with the ceremony taking place late in the book (since it provides an excellent means of putting all the suspects in one place). Fortunately, Meriet's brother and the girl are in love.
  • Dead Man's Ransom: The young Welsh hostage Hugh hopes to exchange for a captive Sheriff Prescott has been betrothed to a girl 'who is very well indeed and if I must, she'll do.' from childhood. Then he meets the Sheriff's beautiful daughter...
  • An Excellent Mystery: Brother Humilis arranged a marriage for himself with a very young girl prior to going on Crusade, since he knew he'd be gone for years and wanted to have children. However, when he returned, he entered a monastery rather than completing the contract. She then supposedly entered a convent; the plot is set in motion when it is realized that she never arrived at the convent.
  • The Hermit of Eyton Forest: The boy's grandmother is trying to force him into an Arranged Marriage with the grown daughter of a neighbouring landowner. Neither potential spouse is keen on this.
  • The Summer of the Danes: Heledd has been betrothed to a man she's never seen by Owain Gwynedd. She, however, is determined to take her fate into her own hands and that includes marrying a man of her choice.
• Asshole Victim:
  • While there's no And There Was Much Rejoicing after Father Ailnoth is found dead, no one mourns him either due to his morally reprehensible actions driving a young girl to suicide through his doctrinally unsound assumption that if the flesh was weak then the spirit was unwilling, refusing to baptize a child and then refusing to bury an unbaptized child (yes, the same one), and his habit of beating schoolchildren.
  • Downplayed with Gilbert Prestcote's death: he wasn't disliked in the least, but his murder is more or less ignored by everyone to avoid stirring up a hornet's test. It helps that the murderer was genuinely repentant and willing to die to atone.
• The Atoner: Nigel Apsley in The Devil's Novice. Arrested for treason against the King, but cleared of the charge of murder, he enlists in the army King Stephen musters to march against a band of rebels. Also the titular character in The Confession of Brother Haluin, who makes a Deathbed Confession after suffering a terrible injury but survives, and vows to earn his penance by way of a pilgrimage.
• Batman Gambit: In The Devil's Novice, a runaway villein named Harald is taken in for having the late Peter Clemence's dagger. Hugh doesn't actually suspect him, but putting the half-starved man in a warm cell during a cold snap is a kindness, and by letting his officers put it about that they've found the "murderer", he hopes to provoke the real culprit into letting down their guard.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Subverted. Most of the troubled souls Cadfael winds up taking under his wing in their hour of need are described in extensive and glowing terms. Notably, the inverse is rarely played completely straight, and murderers and unpleasant characters are often very beautiful or comely. Additionally, The Leper of Saint Giles features a character who is revealed to be a good person but has been horribly disfigured by illness, especially his face.
• Benevolent Boss: Cadfael's monastery has two abbots over the course of the series, and while Abbot Heribert is far more of a pushover than his more astute successor Abbot Radulfus, both are highly benevolent.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Many of the series' murderers, but especially Brother Columbanus of A Morbid Taste for Bones, Simon of The Leper of Saint Giles, and Evrard of The Virgin in the Ice for sheer cold-blooded audacity and viciousness. Janyn Linde of The Devil's Novice is portrayed as an actual sociopath, attempting to murder his childhood friend and only ally just to take his horse when things go sour; he's also a Karma Houdini, although the ending hints that Hugh Beringar is going to the battle at Lincoln to arrange for some Laser-Guided Karma for Linde.
• Bluffing the Murderer:
  • Cadfael does this in A Morbid Taste for Bones.
  • Ermina Hugonin in The Virgin in the Ice.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: After committing the perfect murder, Janyn Linde cannot resist lifting the murder victim's largest, most unique piece of jewelry, and gifting it to an airheaded girl, who brings it to her wedding and displays it in front of the men most likely to recognize it.
• Break the Haughty:
  • The Devil's Novice: Roswitha Linde, who seemingly has no purpose in life but to look beautiful and bask in the admiring stares of every man she encounters, gets severely broken when her brother is revealed as a murderer, her newlywed husband deserts her after being revealed as a traitor to the king, she herself is revealed to be complicit in both murder and treason, and last but not least, said husband nearly dies after being stabbed in the back by said brother. Hugh and Cadfael are standing outside her husband's hospital room when Roswitha exits and hurries past them. Cadfael notes wryly that she is as beautiful as always, but for perhaps the first time in her life, she is trying very hard not to be noticed.
  • The Holy Thief: Brother Jerome attacks an innocent bystander in the mistaken belief that the man is scheming to take a holy relic from the Abbey. The man survives, but Jerome is shaken to his core when he was afraid the man might die. In the following novel, Brother Cadfael's Penance, Cadfael notes that Jerome is still keeping silent and withdrawn a year after the event (but further notes that Jerome being Jerome, it won't last).
• Bribe Backfire: In A Morbid Taste For Bones, Prior Robert offers Rhisiart a purse of coins if he will reverse his opposition to moving St. Winifred's bones to Shrewsbury Abbey. Cadfael (or practically anyone else in the room) could have told Robert what a disastrous idea it was, and Rhisiart is not only deeply offended, but storms outside and tells the assembled crowd that he will be dead and buried before he allows St. Winifred to be taken off Welsh soil.
• Call to Agriculture: Zigzagged by Cadfael himself — he retired from the adventurous life of a Crusader and sea captain to tend the abbey's herb gardens and brew medicines. But that doesn't stop him for a moment from battling evil with his brain rather than a sword.
• Chekhov's Skill: Liliwin's training as a Contortionist in The Sanctuary Sparrow, which allows him to worm his way into a narrow barn air-hatch and rescue Rannilt.
• The Coroner: Madog of the Dead-Boat fills this narrative role, more or less, in cases where bodies turn up in the Severn, assessing how long they've been in the water and predicting where they most likely went into it.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: The mystery of who the dead woman in The Potter's Field is would have been solved much sooner if anyone had told Donata Blount, the ailing widow of the local landowner, about the body that was found in the field. But out of respect for her (terminal) condition, no-one does until near the end.
• Cramming the Coffin: Cadfael has to resort to this trick in A Morbid Taste for Bones, as well as some quick talking to explain how the desiccated bones of a saint suddenly weigh as much as a mortal man.
• Dead Guy Junior: The son of Hugh Beringar and Aline Siward is named after Aline's brother Giles, who was one of the 94 men of the Shrewsbury garrison who were hanged by King Stephen after the siege at the start of One Corpse Too Many.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • The characters adhere to medieval values, such as unquestioning loyalty to one's lord, chastity before marriage and ordeal by battle. Cadfael is not so resolute about many of these ideas but he doesn't protest them either. There are heroic characters who think "outside the box", such as Cadfael himself and Earl Ranulf, while others, such as Olivier, are very strictly imbued with feudal values.
  • The noble, landowning characters also put an emphasis on maintaining and adding to their patrimony that may not sit well with modern readers. Even honorable characters like Hugh Beringar are sympathetic to those who switch sides in order to save their property (but not those who switch sides for personal gain) and raiding for loot or extending borders by force is accepted as a matter of course.
  • No character, male or female, ever refers to an unborn child as anything other than a son. Even Cadfael himself doesn't deviate from this practice despite his appreciation for women's worth, as if so much as mentioning the possibility of having a daughter might jinx the pregnancy's outcome.
  • The dead man in Monk's Hood keeps the son of a freeman in legal slavery as a villein and sees nothing wrong with it. That said, serfs and villeins had more rights than slaves (out-and-out slavery was technically illegal in most of medieval Europe), and their lords did not own anywhere near all of the serfs' and villeins' time.
• Disposing of a Body: While death is commonplace in medieval Europe, the methods of murder and body disposal available to a villain feel relatively limited, but there are at least two unusual examples:
  • In One Corpse Too Many, the murderer hides his victim among the bodies of a rebel garrison who were recently executed; only a man as observant as Cadfael would stop to ask why there are ninety-five corpses laid out for burial instead of ninety-four.
  • In The Virgin in the Ice, the murderer drops his victim into a stream ahead of a rapidly-approaching winter storm. By the next day, the corpse is solidly entombed in ice, and the heroes have to chip a whole block out of the stream, haul it back to the abbey and wait for it to thaw out.
• Divine Intervention: The series includes several apparently genuine miracles, with the most blatant being the curing of Rhun's disability in The Pilgrim of Hate.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Maud insists on being referred to as "Empress", based on her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V. One of her many Berserk Buttons is being addressed by her current title of Countess, even if she hasn't been the Empress of anything since Henry died and she remarried to Geoffrey of Anjou.
• Doomed by Canon: "Doomed" is a bit strong, but the ambitious and uptight Prior Robert, who'd been angling for the position of abbot since day one, did indeed become the fifth abbot of Shrewsbury Abbey after Abbot Radulfus.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first novel is mostly set far from Shrewsbury and is less of a straight-up mystery than a political drama with a murder in it.
• Everyone Has Standards: Cadfael, an accomplished herbalist, refuses to grow or use hemlock due to its poisonous qualities.
• The Exotic Detective: Cadfael, as a cloistered medieval monk, is not the usual sort of character to be a fictional detective.
• Faking the Dead: In Brother Cadfael's Penance, he and Olivier smuggle an unconscious Philip out of a castle that's being handed over to Philip's vengeful enemies by shrouding him like a corpse, then handing him off to an accomplice posing as the dead man's uncle.
• Fix Fic: The Reveal in One Corpse Too Many offers a possible explanation for an historical action (the post-siege killing of all ninety-four defenders of the Empress' claim to Shrewsbury) by King Stephen that was totally Out of Character for him.
• Foil: Ellis Peters presents King Stephen and Empress Maud as two sides of the same coin; each of them has a quality that the other lacks, and Peters implies that, merged together, they would make one admirable ruler:
  • Stephen is laconic, easily bored, affable, and wants to like and be liked by everyone. Unfortunately this means he forgives too many of the English nobles who've sided with Maud, often encouraging them to switch right back to her when it looks like she's winning. He also can't follow through on battles or sieges that aren't quickly won. Worst of all, in the prologue to Dead Man's Ransom, when his army is holding the high ground at Lincoln, his sense of fair play compels him to order them to abandon their position and meet Maud's army on equal terms—resulting in his army being routed and himself being captured.
  • Maud is rigorous, obsessive, only charming when she makes a deliberate effort, and never forgets or forgives anyone who's ever trespassed against her. After Stephen's capture, she makes a triumphant entry into London in the belief that she's finally won the war—then she starts tearing into the city's nobles who failed to come to her aid and promises to make them pay for it—resulting in them rebelling against her and forcing her to flee back to the countryside. When Robert of Gloucester is captured at the next battle, Maud has no choice but to release Stephen and exchange him.
  • To the endless frustration of the nobles on both sides, Stephen and Maud both demonstrate qualities that would be admirable during peacetime, but in wartime only serve to toss the Idiot Ball from one to the other and prolong the stalemate and the fighting.
• Foreshadowing: Cadfael's relationship with the widow Mariam is first mentioned in A Morbid Taste for Bones: their son appears several books later.
• Friend on the Force: Sheriff Hugh Beringar is Cadfael's.
• Giving Them the Strip:
  • At the climax of A Morbid Taste for Bones, Sioned impersonates the shroud-wrapped St. Winifred to intimidate the killer into confessing. When she comes too close and he grabs hold of the linen she's draped in, she whirls around so the cloth unwinds from around her body, not enough to free her but enough to leave her out of reach of his weapon.
  • In The Leper of St. Giles, suspected killer Jocelyn Lucy is spotted by some of Prestcote's men while sneaking around, face half-hidden in a borrowed chaperon (a medieval hood/turban). One of the patrol members gets hold of his headwear and tries to choke him unconscious with its fabric, but the cloth breaks before Jocelyn can be incapacitated.
• Good Bad Girl:
  • Avice of Thornbury, aka Sister Magdalen, back in her youth. She was also something of a High-Class Call Girl, being the mistress to a lord who never took on other lovers.
  • Eluned from The Raven in the Foregate, a sweet girl who just can't say no. Unfortunately, the new priest assumes (contrary to Scripture) that if the flesh was weak then the spirit was unwilling.
• Good Is Not Dumb:
  • Brother Cadfael is a very intelligent man, quite good at medicine, reading people and bringing the most unnoticeable clues together. He is also remarkably kind and compassionate.
  • Hugh Beringar is a good and honorable person — and devious and ruthless as well.
  • Brother Mark is someone both Cadfael and Hugh would insist is a much better man than either, morally. He sees through Jocelyn Lucy's disguise and discerns the fugitive is innocent within minutes of noticing his presence among the lepers.
• Good Shepherd: Many characters in the books, but special mention goes to Brother Mark, who despite his youth and hard upbringing freely ministers to lepers and criminals, and in Cadfael's opinion has the makings of a saint. Both Abbots Heribert and Radulfus, Brother Paul who takes care of the novices, and the late Father Adam all show strong shades of this, and of course Cadfael himself works hard to bring in lambs led astray, in his own slightly unorthodox way. Even Oswin shows signs of becoming this once he matures out of his carelessness and switches from being Cadfael's helper to manning the hospital.
• Hair Memento: In The Devil's Novice, Meriet is found to have a lock of a girl's hair among his possessions, and it's burned by the Holier Than Thou Brother Jerome. Meriet goes berserk and attacks Jerome in response. Later Cadfael discovers it's not hair from Meriet's Self-Proclaimed Love Interest Isouda but his future sister-in-law Roswitha, who's something of The Tease. He gets over her in the end.
• Heel Realization: In The Holy Thief, the smug Brother Jerome suddenly realizes that he does have it in him to commit murder. Even though he turns out to be innocent, it's the moral shock that drives him to do some long-overdue soul-searching.
• The High Middle Ages: Set in the mid-12th century during the Anarchy — the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud.
• Historical Domain Character: Many of the secondary characters in the Cadfael novels were based on real persons — including both the abbots, Prior Robert ^note  known to history as Robert of Shrewsbury, he was the abbot after Radulfus and really was the man responsible for transferring the remains of St. Winifred from Wales to Shrewsbury Abbey , King Stephen and Empress Maud, all of the princes and earls mentioned, and even some of the Shrewsbury residents.
• Historical Fiction: The Cadfael Series has been cited in books of Medieval Life for the excellence of its period detail.
• Horny Vikings: While the Danes hired by Cadwaladr plunder isolated farms and take hostages, they're a far cry from the usual bloodthirsty Rape, Pillage, and Burn types (being Christians from the Dane-Irish kingdom of Dublin, and having mostly been hired to look scary rather than actually invade). The only blood shed is due to a naïve idiot big on Honor Before Reason.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Father and son William and Edward Rede in the short story "Eye Witness," who quarrel and bicker but ferociously defend each other against outsiders' criticism. The man who robs and attempts to murder William makes the mistake of assuming Eddi genuinely wanted him dead, and offers him a cut of the loot for his complicity.
• Identifying the Body: In The Virgin in the Ice, Brother Cadfael has to ask a boy, Yves Hugonin, to identify his sister's body, as they were traveling away from home and no adult relatives are available. Yves identifies the corpse — not as his sister but as the young nun who was traveling with them.
• Ill-Fated Flowerbed: The white rosebush in The Rose Rent is attacked twice, once with a blade and again with fire.
• Insatiable Newlyweds: Referenced in "The Sanctuary Sparrow"; when asked if she can account for her husband Daniel's movements at night, Margery Aurifaber replies that she can, adding "We are but lately married". Unfortunately for Daniel, there's a witness to prove she's lying.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: How Cadfael decides that the prime suspect (the victim's stepson) in Monk's Hood is innocent; Cadfael implies that the murder was a stabbing rather than a poisoning, and the boy doesn't spot the deliberate mistake. Cadfael repeats this trick in The Potter's Field by implying to one of the suspects that the victim died of a head wound (which she had not); again, he does not contradict this, thus proving his innocence even though he's trying to claim that he did it.
• Indentured Servitude: the medieval equivalent was villeiny, and it comes up in both Monk's Hood and A Raven in the Foregate.
• Ironic Echo: In One Corpse Too Many, Hugh Beringar and Brother Cadfael are competing to find stolen treasure. When Beringar thinks he's won, he offers to toast Cadfael's success "against all opponents but Hugh Beringar." A few paragraphs later, when it's clear how comprehensively Cadfael outwitted him, Cadfael hands him a beaker of wine, and toasts his success — against all opponents but Cadfael.
• Karmic Death: Often, and also subverted, but played especially straight with Father Ailnoth of "Raven in the Foregate" and also with Godfrid Picard.
• Kicked Upstairs: Inverted with Abbot Heribert, who is demoted to choir monk and could not be happier about it. It helps that the replacement abbot is a Reasonable Authority Figure rather than the severe and overambitious Prior Robert.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Played across the whole spectrum. Knights are people, after all, and they vary as much as any other people. The straightest example, however, is probably Olivier de Bretagne.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: In One Corpse Too Many, Beringar is introduced as a possible antagonist, not to mention one of the people Cadfael suspects of the murder. Anyone who's read one of the later books will know he's not guilty.
• Literary Allusion Title: An Excellent Mystery (from the Book of Common Prayer).
• Locked Out of the Loop: Everyone in The Potter's Field goes out of their way to conceal what's going on from Donata, not wanting to burden her when she's so ill. This turns out to be the worst course of action they could take, as she's the only one alive who knew the truth about the buried woman's death and could have exonerated all the suspects in one go.
• Luke, You Are My Father: In the Cadfael novel The Virgin in the Ice, Olivier de Bretagne turns out to be Cadfael's son by a woman he loved in his young roving days. This has ramifications later in the series, particularly in the final novel.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: In "The Sanctuary Sparrow" Liliwin and Rannilt succumb to temptation while hiding behind a church altar.
• Mal Mariée: French for "badly married," this trope refers to a young woman unhappily married to a jealous older man who often falls in love and cheats on him with a young lover. In "The Sanctuary Sparrow", the wife of a wealthy and aged wool merchant takes lovers while her oblivious husband is away on business. But when one of said lovers tries to use her as an alibi (he's innocent of that particular crime, but was engaging in other illegal activity nearby), she laughs in his face and makes it clear she has no intention of giving up the position and money her marriage gives her for him, moving her further from the usually sympathetic portrayal of this subtrope of Sympathetic Adulterer.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • The many potential interventions of Saint Winifred, whom Cadfael helped discover in the first novel.
  • Did God actually aim the Karmic Laser at Father Ailnoth for his hypocritical, self-righteous cruelty that ruined lives and drove a young girl to suicide? Cynric the verger certainly seems to think so.
• Meaningful Name: A lot of characters have surnames that still match their family's profession: Edric Flesher is a butcher, Turstan Fowler is a falconer, and so on.
• Meet the In-Laws: Played With in The Leper of St. Giles. Squire Joscelin Lucy is hiding from the Sheriff's men after being accused of murdering his master, Huon de Domville, who was engaged to the Lady Iveta de Massard, whom Joscelin loves. A leper, "Lazarus", takes him in and helps him hide, questioning him about his intentions and his motives. Joscelin has no idea that Lazarus is actually Iveta's grandfather Guimar de Massard, who by the end of their acquaintance is satisfied that Joscelin loves Iveta truly, couldn't care less about her family fortune, and would be more than willing to lose her to a better man, if it meant she would be happy.
• Medieval Universal Literacy: Set in 12th century England, the level of literacy varies: All the monks and nobility can read, as can most of the richer merchants, and there is repeated mention of church priests teaching young children to read.
• Moustache de Plume: Written by Edith Pargeter under the pseudonym Ellis Peters
• Murder by Inaction: In The Raven in the Foregate, it turns out that the victim wasn't murdered (by being hit on the head and thrown in the river) at all. The man who witnesses his death, never previously a suspect, when it looks like another will be punished for the deed, comes forward and confesses that he simply didn't help the victim when he slipped on some ice, hit a tree stump and slid down the riverbank unconscious. Specifically, the victim slipped while he was beating an elderly woman with his stave for begging for her nursling's life when he overbalanced; she fled the scene as he fell and never saw what happened to him.
• My Master, Right or Wrong:
  • Olivier to Empress Maud. He is presented as pure and noble for it instead of gray.
  • Likewise Earl Robert of Gloucester to Maud, his cousin (though Yves admits that she often treats him like dirt).
  • Gwion to Cadwaladr in The Summer of Danes. Here it's shown as bad because it leads to several entirely unnecessary deaths, all the more so because Cadwaladr has a bad case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that Gwion can't get his mind around. Gwion even murders a fellow underling of Cadwaladr's for seeing the writing on the wall and refusing his lord the help owed.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: In One Corpse Too Many, a ninety-fifth body is found among the ninety-four hanged.
• Never Suicide: Or at least never acknowledge that it is suicide—a mortal sin that would deprive the victim of Christian burial.
• New Old Flame: Richildis, in the Cadfael novel Monk's Hood is the girl he was affianced to before he set out on crusade.
• Not Blood, Not Family: * (Very) briefly happens in "The Confession of Brother Haluin", when it's revealed the half-sister of a family is actually unrelated to them by blood. The head of the family says she's entitled to nothing... before clarifying that she has no family but them and so should stay, blood ties or no.
  Cenred: So she is no sister of mine. She is no sister of mine!
  Adelais: None, but until now she believed herself so. It is not her fault, never cast blame on her.
  Cenred: She is no kin to me. I owe her nothing, neither dowry nor lands. She has no claim on me.
  Adelais: None. But she is kin to me, [...] She will not be penniless.
  Cenred: Madam, you mistake me. This house has been her home, she will still think of it as home. Where else is there for her? It is we here who are suddenly cut off, like topped limbs. Her father and mother, both, are in the cloister, and what guidance, what care has she ever had from you? Kin to us or not, she belongs here at Vivers.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: In One Corpse Too Many, Aline's assurances to Adam Courcelle that he couldn't have been expected to save her brother Giles and wasn't responsible for his death, when after Shrewsbury was captured he encouraged King Stephen to kill all its defenders, Giles among them. Also, it turns out he directly betrayed Giles when the latter attempted to change sides.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Resolved in the case of two Historical Domain Characters by referring to them by different forms of the same name — hence, Empress Maud (King Stephen's rival claimant to the throne) and Queen Matilda (his wife).
  • Two characters sharing a name (Rhun) are even commented on by Cadfael, though they never meet.
• Origins Episode: The short story "A Light on the Road to Woodstock" (the first of three in A Rare Benedictine) for Brother Cadfael, explaining how a soldier returning from the Crusades became a monk.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: Prior Robert Pennant. In Monk's Hood when the abbot is demoted it looks like we're going to see a Tyrant Takes the Helm story, but he is crushed when another man is chosen to be the new abbot at the story's end. The historic Robert did become abbot, but later.
• Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: The truth behind The Potter's Field.
• Police Are Useless:
  • Monk's Hood: When Hugh's sergeant Will Warden is in charge of investigating the murder of Gervais Bonel, he not only leaps straight to the wrong conclusion, but smugly ignores or brushes aside all evidence against his chosen suspect's guilt and is a huge Jerkass about the whole thing. Cadfael just accepts this is how it will go and has to work around it.
  • A Morbid Taste for Bones: Griffith ap Rhys, the prince's bailiff, has very little interest in punishing Brother John for the minor crime of helping a most likely innocent man evade arrest, and none at all in overriding the locals' wishes and pursuing him when he himself "escapes" from a (very comfortable) confinement. The bailiff explains that it's common enough for petty criminals to flee their native lands and settle down to quiet and respectable lives in distant localities, or even return home years later once the heat has subsided, which is how Engelard, a Saxon, came to live in a Welsh village like Gwytherin. Brother John himself settles there in the end for the same reason; he and Shrewsbury Abbey are mostly content to be rid of each other.
• Practically Different Generations: In Monk's Hood Edwin Gurney is 17 years younger than his sister, and four months younger than her son, his nephew.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Abbot Radulfus. Saint Peter's Fair shows him both maintaining the traditional rights of the abbey and making accommodations for war-damaged Shrewsbury.
  • Roger de Clinton, who conducts the trial in "The Heretic's Apprentice" and recognizes that Elave's point of view, while not in lockstep with Church doctrine, is still valid and does not contradict Scripture.
• Refused Reunion: In Leper of Saint Giles, the titular character turns out to be the grandfather of the young heiress, who secretly intervened to save her from a horrible arranged marriage. But when Cadfael urges him to reveal himself to her and her beloved so they can thank him, the leper shows why it'd be a bad idea by lifting up his mask; he would rather be remembered as a dead hero than a hideous leper.
• Replacement Goldfish: Averted in The Devil's Novice: when Meriet Aspley's older brother is arrested for treason against the King, their father switches his affections to Meriet, but finally recognizes what is blatantly obvious to everyone else; that Meriet is much closer to him in character, and much more stubbornly honorable, than the elder ever was.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: When King Stephen lays siege to Shrewsbury Castle, one of the garrison, Giles Siward, slips out of the castle and into the siege camp, betraying the garrison commander's plans to send his treasury to safety in exchange for his own life. Unfortunately, the officer he reveals this to proves to be just as venal and decides to ambush the couriers and take the treasury for himself — in addition to which, he makes sure that Giles is hanged along with the rest of the garrison after the castle is captured.
• Sacred Hospitality: Leoric Aspley takes this very seriously. The fact that a guest in his house was murdered by one of his own sons weighs on him heavily. When Cadfael visits during his investigation, he notes how courteous Leoric is, even serving Cadfael himself.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: The response of Rhisiart in A Morbid Taste for Bones, when Prior Robert offers him money for his support in exhuming St Winifred's body.^note In the account written by the historical Prior Robert, he admits to using bribery to obtain cooperation from the locals.
• Seeking Sanctuary: The plot of The Sanctuary Sparrow is driven by this; a young minstrel falsely accused of theft is chased by a baying mob to the abbey, where he claims the right of sanctuary until his name can be cleared.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: Miles in The Rose Rent: his first, relatively harmless criminal act — destroying a rose bush to break the contract giving Shrewsbury Abbey a claim to the house it occupies, when he believes Judith intends to leave her entire estate to him leads to him committing murder, and everything he does afterwards is done to prevent himself from being discovered and fulfill his original goal. At the end of the novel, after his arrest, Cadfael and Judith reflect sadly that he seemed less evil than simply bewildered, as if he honestly could not understand how he came to do the things he did.
• Smug Snake: Cadwaladr is a self-centered backstabber who switches alliances as he sees fit with no regard to the consequences for other people (or indeed the consequences to himself any further than in the short term).
• Stealing from Thieves: In Eye Witness, the abbey's stolen gold is found and taken by a itinerant peddler... right back to the abbey, where he waits alongside the porter for the thief to be caught. The peddler confesses that he was quite tempted to just take the gold and flee, but in the end decided it was better to have a small but honest reward rather than a purely hypothetical gain accompanied by jail time.
• Stealth Pun: The title of The Rose Rent ostensibly refers to the annual rent of a single white rose paid by the abbey to the owner of a house. However, it could equally refer to the climactic moment in which the bush from which the roses are taken is deliberately damaged (i.e. "rent") and its defender pays with his life.
• Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism
• Stockholm Syndrome: Averted in Summer of the Danes, where Heledd goes freely with the Danes who'd been holding her hostage, seeing as they'd never mistreated her and her options in England were to take the veil or marry a man she'd never met and become his obedient wife.
• Strong Family Resemblance:
  • In Monk's Hood teenagers Edwin and Edwy are actually uncle and nephew, but similar enough that a stranger could mistake one for the other.
  • Downplayed with Olivier; when Hugh says Olivier reminds him of Cadfael for a brief instant, the father says that no, Olivier takes after his mother.
• Surprise Pregnancy: In the backstory of Monk's Hood: Richildis and her husband were delighted to hear that their first grandson was on the way, One Thing Led to Another, and the grandson ended up with a surprise uncle of the same age.
• Sweet Polly Oliver:
  • 'Godric' in One Corpse Too Many.
  • Brother Fidelis in An Excellent Mystery. With some Sweet on Polly Oliver, as Brother Urien attempts Sexual Extortion when he sees something that implicates "him" in a disappearance.
• Taking The Arrow: In The Sanctuary Sparrow, Susanna interposes herself to save her lover from an archer. Downplayed in that it's already very clear that she's not expecting to get out of the situation alive, once Hugh's men surround the barn where the murderess and her boyfriend/accomplice are holed up. Her act is therefore as much one of spiting her foes as saving her man.
• Taking the Heat:
  • In The Devil's Novice, this almost gets a double treatment. A lord's second son and The Unfavorite stumbles across his beloved elder brother trying to hide a dead man. He immediately assumes that his brother is the killer, and tells him to get away and establish his alibi. The lord then catches the second son with the corpse and assumes in turn that he is the killer. The young man agrees to become a cloistered monk to spare the family name—but neither the heir nor the second son is the actual murderer. This would be a full-on double example except that the elder son had never had any intention of Taking the Heat himself—he was just trying to dispose of the body after his co-conspirator and friend committed the murder.
  • In The Potter's Field, a young man tries to take the blame for a murder he believes his late father committed in order to protect the family name. As it happens, his mother knows the truth and it's not what anybody expects.
• Taking the Veil: Occurs a few times, with men as well as women.
  • Avice of Thornbury in The Leper of St Giles has been a noble's mistress for years. She becomes a nun after his murder as a career, not a vocation. Cadfael reflects that with her energy and ability she's likely to end up an Abbess or even a saint. She returns later in the series as Sister Magdalena, and is very much a Distaff Counterpart to Cadfael.
  • Judith from The Rose Rent seriously considers doing this, as much to get away from gold-digging suitors as because she feels like she's not really needed. Subverted when both Cadfael and Sister Magdalena caution her that Taking the Veil should be a calling-to, not an escape-from, and when she finds new love with Niall, who genuinely cares for her and doesn't give a damn about her wealth.
  • In Monk's Hood, Cadfael's New Old Flame Richildis thinks that she's the cause of a gender-flipped version—that Cadfael took the cowl because she married another man. Cadfael doesn't disabuse her of the notion.
  • In A Morbid Taste for Bones, Cadfael's sidekick, Brother John, became a monk because his young lady turned him down. It doesn't last, as John finds love with a local girl during the Prior's expedition to Wales to obtain the bones of St. Winifred, and quickly decides that he doesn't want to be a monk any more.
  • Brother Ruald in The Potter's Field deserted his beautiful wife after being called to become a monk. She was understandably furious with her husband of fifteen years for leaving her, but Ruald is regarded by most people in a positive light for obeying the call to serve God (which everyone sees as being something he could not have avoided, and he is shown to be genuinely happy as a monk). That said, some characters (the women especially) are very sympathetic towards the wife's predicament, as she was left with nothing and was unable to remarry; Ruald himself eventually admits that, while he could do nothing but obey the call, he treated her unfairly. Mention is also made of a Real Life Welsh saint, Illtud, who forsook his wife in favour of monasticism.
  • In the same book, Sulein Blount has shades of this. He eventually decides that the monastic life is not for him, something that Abbot Radulfus had already come to suspect, but he wanted the young man to come to that conclusion of his own accord.
• That Old-Time Prescription: Brother Cadfael is the abbey's herbalist and apothecary, and the remedies he uses are both familiar and surprisingly accurate.
• Think of the Children!: Empress Maud's official line is that she is fighting for the rights of her young son Henry to inherit the English throne, and couldn't care less about restoring her own royal title or right to rule. Her councilors all nod dutifully, and save their massive eye-rolls for when they are out of her sight and hearing.
• Throwing Off the Disability: Rhun in The Pilgrim of Hate is confirmed to be physically lame early in the novel, but during the festival of St. Winifred he drops his crutches and walks up the steps to her reliquary. He becomes a recurring character in the series, and retains the ability to walk whenever he appears.
• Trail Of Breadcrumbs: In The Virgin in the Ice, Yves secretly punctures a large wineskin among the brigands' booty, causing his captors to unwittingly leave a trail of red wine-drops behind them in the snow.
• Trial by Combat: Used in One Corpse Too Many. If the murderer was tried normally, evidence distressing to Beringar's love interest would be exposed. In order to keep it secret, Beringar demands the case be settled by combat instead.
• Tuck and Cover: During the siege of La Musarderie, Philip does this to shield an armorer's youngest apprentice from shrapnel.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: In The Devil's Novice, when Cadfael first sees Roswitha Linde's widowed father arrive at the Abbey to give her away at her wedding, the contrast between him and Roswitha is as strong as the similarity between her and her brother Janyn. Cadfael cannot stop himself from wondering just how divinely gorgeous their mother must have been to create two such beautiful children with such a stout, homely man.
• Underling with an F in PR: In "The Rose Rent", Miles' mother starts boasting about her son's generosity in front of the sheriff, going on about how he gave a pair of his old boots away to a man (who was later found dead). Miles desperately tries to stop her, but by then it's too late: Cadfael and Hugh were wondering why the dead man (and presumed culprit) owned boots that didn't fit and whose distinctive prints were found at the site of the first murder, identifying Miles as the story's culprit.
• The Unfavorite: Meriet Aspley, Leoric Aspley's second son. Cadfael eventually spells out to the father exactly how he has undervalued his son, why his son provokes him, and furthermore that they are both far more alike than either would care to admit. Lampshaded by Brother Paul, when the wedding party arrives at Shrewsbury, including both brothers:
  "Difficult," said Brother Paul, always sensitive to youth and its obscure torments, "to be second to such a one."
  "Difficult indeed," said Cadfael ruefully.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The whole plot of The Heretic's Apprentice is kicked off when Canon Gerbert's clueless underling remarks how happy he is to hear that Elave's deceased master made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, after being accused of heresy so many years before. Gerbert immediately wants to hear everything about this accusation.
• Uriah Gambit
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In The Heretic's Apprentice Canon Gerbert has a Freudian Excuse for his heretic-hunting in that he's seen some truly horrific cults during his travels.
• What Could Have Been: In-Universe. During the peace summit in Brother Cadfael's Penance, Empress Maud haughtily declares that she is the rightful heir to the throne, as King Henry's only surviving child. Cadfael (Welsh by birth) grumbles to himself that, to be accurate, she is Henry's only surviving legitimate child; the King left behind at least a score of bastards, including Maud's right-hand man, Earl Robert of Gloucester. Cadfael muses that if Welsh law applied (which allows illegitimate children to inherit their fathers' titles and property), Earl Robert would have a better claim to the throne, and (though no one dares say it aloud) be a more popular candidate than either Stephen or Maud. The nobles of England would have been all too happy to accept him as their new king, and there would have been no civil war at all.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Played with. Some supporting characters reappear in later novels, allowing readers to get a glimpse of how they are faring, while others do not. This is justified, given that the novels are set between 1137 and 1145 ^note  with one short story going back to 1120, the year Cadfael gave up soldiering to become a monk and the action (mostly) takes place in and around Shrewsbury, with some characters passing through on their way to Wales or other parts of England.
• Wicked Cultured: In The Hermit of Eyton Forest, greedy and cruel Drogo Bosiet is nonetheless a fairly decent Shatranj player. So is the traitor Renaud Bourchier, alias Cuthred, who kills Bosiet for recognizing him.
• Women Are Wiser: Alluded to in The Potter's Field when Pernel Otmere, a young lady who has developed romantic feelings for one of the suspects, decries the futility of the men having decided not to tell the terminally ill Donata Blount about the body that was found in the titular field.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Cadfael and Hugh become lifelong friends because they interacted this way in One Corpse Too Many, in this case in a battle of wits rather than steel.
  • Implied to be why the Fatimids treated Lazarus so well after he was captured and diagnosed with leprosy.

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