A Rare Benedictine
Table
of Contents
A Light on the Road to Woodstock
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5
BROTHER
CADFAEL SPRANG TO LIFE SUDDENLY AND UNEXPECTEDLY WHEN HE WAS ALREADY
APPROACHING SIXTY, mature, experienced, fully armed and seventeen years
tonsured. He emerged as the necessary protagonist when I had the idea of
deriving a plot for a murder mystery from the true history of Shrewsbury Abbey
in the twelfth century, and needed the high mediaeval equivalent of a
detective, an observer and agent of justice in the centre of the action. I had
no idea then what I was launching on the world, nor to how demanding a mentor I
was subjecting myself. Nor did I intend a series of books about him, indeed I
went on immediately to write a modern detective novel, and returned to the
twelfth century and Shrewsbury only when I could no longer resist the
temptation to shape another book round the siege of Shrewsbury and the massacre
of the garrison by King Stephen, which followed shortly after the prior’s
expedition into Wales to bring back the relics of Saint Winifred for his Abbey.
From then on Brother Cadfael was well into his stride, and there was no turning
back.
Since
the action in the first book was almost all in Wales, and even in succeeding
ones went back and forth freely across the border, just as the history of
Shrewsbury always has, Cadfael had to be Welsh, and very much at home there.
His name was chosen as being so rare that I can find it only once in Welsh
history, and even in that instance it disappears almost as soon as it is
bestowed in baptism. Saint Cadog, contemporary and rival of Saint David, a
powerful saint in Glamorgan, was actually christened Cadfael, but ever after
seems to have been ‘familiarly known’, as Sir John Lloyd says, as Cadog. A name
of which the saint had no further need, and which appears, as far as I know,
nowhere else, seemed just the thing for my man. No implication of saintliness was
intended, though indeed when affronted Saint Cadog seems to have behaved with
the unforgiving ferocity of most of his kind, at least in legend. My monk had
to be a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned
tolerance for the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with all
its enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from the beginning. Only
later did readers begin to wonder and ask about his former roving life, and how
and why he became a monk.
For
reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and write a book about
his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, the entire sequence of
novels proceeds steadily season by season, year by year, in a progressive
tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a
glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on his vocation, I was
glad to use it.
So
here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an age of
relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented by cantankerous
schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always been an unquestioning
believer. What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance
of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile
and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new
need and a different challenge.
In
India it is not unknown for a man who has possessed great power and wealth to
discard everything when he reaches a certain age recognisable to him when it
comes not by dates and times, but by an inward certainty put on the yellow robe
of a sannyasi, and go away with nothing but a begging bowl, at once into the
world and out of it.
Given
the difference in climate and tradition between the saffron robe and the
voluminous black habit, the solitary with the wilderness for his cloister, and
the wall suddenly enclosing and embracing the traveller over half the world,
that is pretty much what Cadfael does in entering the Rule of Saint Benedict in
the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury.
Thereafter,
on occasions and for what he feels to be good reasons, he may break the rules.
He will never transgress against the Rule, and never abandon it.
Ellis Peters 1988
A
Light on the Road to Woodstock
THE
KING’S COURT WAS IN NO HURRY TO RETURN TO ENGLAND, that late autumn of 1120,
even though the fighting, somewhat desultory in these last stages, was long
over, and the enforced peace sealed by a royal marriage. King Henry had brought
to a successful conclusion his sixteen years of patient, cunning, relentless
plotting, fighting and manipulating, and could now sit back in high content,
master not only of England but of Normandy, too. What the Conqueror had
misguidedly dealt out in two separate parcels to his two elder sons, his
youngest son had now put together again and clamped into one. Not without a
hand in removing from the light of day, some said, both of his brothers, one of
whom had been shovelled into a hasty grave under the tower at Winchester, while
the other was now a prisoner in Devizes, and unlikely ever to be seen again by
the outer world.
The
court could well afford to linger to enjoy victory, while Henry trimmed into
neatness the last loose edges still to be made secure. But his fleet was
already preparing at Barfleur for the voyage back to England, and he would be
home before the month ended. Meantime, many of his barons and knights who had
fought his battles were withdrawing their contingents and making for home,
among them one Roger Mauduit, who had a young and handsome wife waiting for
him, certain legal business on his mind, and twenty-five men to ship back to
England, most of them to be paid off on landing.
There
were one or two among the miscellaneous riff-raff he had recruited here in
Normandy on his lord’s behalf whom it might be worth keeping on in his own
service, along with the few men of his household, at least until he was safely
home. The vagabond clerk turned soldier, let him be unfrocked priest or what he
might, was an excellent copyist and a sound Latin scholar, and could put legal
documents in their best and most presentable form, in good time for the King’s
court at Woodstock. And the Welsh man-at-arms, blunt and insubordinate as he
was, was also experienced and accomplished in arms, a man of his word, once
given, and utterly reliable in whatever situation on land or sea, for in both
elements he had long practice behind him. Roger was well aware that he was not
greatly loved, and had little faith in either the valour or the loyalty of his
own men. But this Welshman from Gwynedd, by way of Antioch and Jerusalem and
only God knew where else, had imbibed the code of arms and wore it as a second
nature. With or without love, such service as he pledged, that he would provide.
Roger
put it to them both as his men were embarking at Barfleur, in the middle of a
deceptively placid November, and upon a calm sea.
“I
would have you two accompany me to my manor of Sutton Mauduit by Northampton,
when we disembark, and stay in my pay until a certain lawsuit I have against
the abbey of Shrewsbury is resolved. The King intends to come to Woodstock when
he arrives in England, and will be there to preside over my case on the
twenty-third day of this month. Will you remain in my service until that day?”
The
Welshman said that he would, until that day or until the case was resolved. He
said it indifferently, as one who has no business of any importance anywhere in
the world to pull him in another direction. As well Northampton as anywhere else.
As well Woodstock. And after Woodstock? Why anywhere in particular? There was
no identifiable light beckoning him anywhere, along any road. The world was
wide, fair and full of savour, but without signposts.
Alard,
the tatterdemalion clerk, hesitated, scratched his thick thatch of grizzled red
hair, and finally also said yes, but as if some vague regret drew him in
another direction. It meant pay for some days more, he could not afford to say
no.
“I
would have gone with him with better heart,” he said later, when they were
leaning on the rail together, watching the low blue line of the English shore
rise out of a placid sea, “if he had been taking a more westerly road.”
“Why
that?” asked Cadfael ap Meilyr ap Dafydd. “Have you kin in the west?”
“I
had once. I have not now.”
“Dead?”
“I
am the one who died.” Alard heaved lean shoulders in a helpless shrug, and
grinned. “Fifty-seven brothers I had, and now I’m brotherless. I begin to miss
my kin, now I’m past forty. I never valued them when I was young.” He slanted a
rueful glance at his companion and shook his head. “I was a monk of Evesham, an
oblatus, given to God by my father when I was five years old. When I was
fifteen I could no longer abide to live my life in one place, and I ran.
Stability is one of the vows we take to be content in one stay, and go abroad
only when ordered. That was not for me, not then. My sort they call vagus
frivolous minds that must wander. Well, I’ve wandered far enough, God knows, in
my time. I begin to fear I can never stand still again.”
The
Welshman drew his cloak about him against the chill of the wind. “Are you
hankering for a return?”
“Even
you seamen must drop anchor somewhere at last,” said Alard. “They’d have my
hide if I went back, that I know. But there’s this about penance, it pays all
debts, and leaves the record clear. They’d find a place for me, once I’d paid.
But I don’t know... I don’t know... The vagus is still in me. I’m torn two
ways.”
“After
twenty-five years,” said Cadfael, “a month or two more for quiet thinking can
do no harm. Copy his papers for him and take your case until his business is
settled.”
They
were much of an age, though the renegade monk looked the elder by ten years,
and much knocked about by the world he had coveted from within the cloister. It
had never paid him well in goods or gear, for he went threadbare and thin, but
in wisdom he might have got his fair wages. A little soldiering, a little
clerking, some horse-tending, any labour that came to hand, until he could turn
his hand to almost anything a hale man can do. He had seen, he said, Italy as
far south as Rome, served once for a time under the Count of Flanders, crossed
the mountains into Spain, never abiding anywhere for long. His feet still
served him, but his mind grew weary of the road.
“And
you?” he said, eyeing his companion, whom he had known now for a year in this
last campaign. “You’re something of a vagus yourself, by your own account. All
those years crusading and battling corsairs in the midland sea, and still you
have not enough of it, but must cross the sea again to get buffeted about
Normandy. Had you no better business of your own, once you got back to England,
but you must enlist again in this muddled melee of a war? No woman to take your
mind off fighting?”
“What
of yourself? Free of the cloister, free of the vows!”
“Somehow,”
said Alard, himself puzzled, “I never saw it so. A woman here and there, yes,
when the heat was on me, and there was a woman by and willing, but marriage and
wiving... it never seemed to me I had the right.”
The
Welshman braced his feet on the gently swaying deck and watched the distant
shore draw nearer. A broad-set, sturdy, muscular man in his healthy prime,
brown-haired and brown-skinned from eastern suns and outdoor living,
well-provided in leather coat and good cloth, and well-armed with sword and
dagger. A comely enough face, strongly featured, with the bold bones of his
race there had been women, in his time, who had found him handsome.
“I
had a girl,” he said meditatively, “years back, before ever I went crusading.
But I left her when I took the Cross, left her for three years and stayed away
seventeen. The truth is, in the east I forgot her, and in the west she, thanks
be to God, had forgotten me. I did enquire, when I got back. She’d made a better
bargain, and married a decent, solid man who had nothing of the vagus in him. A
guildsman and counsellor of the town of Shrewsbury, no less. So I shed the load
from my conscience and went back to what I knew, soldiering. With no regrets,”
he said simply. “It was all over and done, years since. I doubt if I should
have known her again, or she me.” There had been other women’s faces in the
years between, still vivid in his memory, while hers had faded into mist.
