Brother Cadfael: An Appreciation

Like a lot of readers, I hoard books ahead of travels, building and winnowing a stack over weeks as departure approaches. But for the past three years, that stack—and every trip—has begun with a book in Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael series. I happened to read the first on a plane, and I quickly realized that this was a series I’d be sad to see end, and one that would benefit from being read away from my usual haunts.

I reached that point last month, embarking on a vacation and carrying with me Brother Cadfael’s Penance, the twenty-first and final book in the series. How better to console myself for the knowledge that this was my last visit with Brother Cadfael than to send other readers to twelfth-century Shrewsbury to make his acquaintance?

Edith Pargeter, who wrote the Cadfael series under the pen name Ellis Peters, was born in 1913 in the town of Horsehay, on the Welsh-English border in Shropshire, where she would eventually set the Cadfael stories. The area remained home her whole life: barring time away during World War II, she never lived more than three miles from her birthplace. She started writing before she was twenty, and by 1936 had published her first novel. She would publish half-a-dozen before 1940, including her first crime novel and her first romance novels, the genre fiction published under pen names. She kept writing during the war while she served on the coast as a WREN, a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She had, as the British put it in those days, “a good war,” coming through unscathed while earning a British Empire Medal and stockpiling knowledge, incidents, and characters that she would draw on for multiple books, including She Goes to War (1942), which was her first commercial success. From the start she wrote strong, unshowy prose, with well-balanced sentences that display an eye for detail and description.

After the war, Pargeter moved back to Shropshire to live with her mother, and then, after her mother’s death in 1954, with her brother, Ellis, whose given name she would borrow for her most famous pen name. The pair kept house together for thirty-five years, until Ellis’s death. All the while, she kept writing, publishing her first novel under the Peters name, Death Mask, in 1959, and the first of what would become a long-running series starring Inspector Felse in 1951. The Felse novels are solidly good but not groundbreaking English detective stories, though Death and the Joyful Woman won an Edgar in 1963. In this period, Pargeter also published numerous translations from Czech, after falling for the country during a summer educational trip, and a number of non-crime novels, including the medieval Heaven Tree trilogy, which she always cited as her favorite of her books.

Any writer who can make a living by her pen can be proud of her work, but it wasn’t until 1977, when A Morbid Taste for Bones introduced Cadfael, that Pargeter made her bid for literary immortality. As a schoolgirl, she had bought a book of Shrewsbury history, and, picking it up again, she found herself taken by a story of a group of monks setting out in search of St. Winifred’s bones. The addition of a murder made it a plot, and the need for a detective brought us Cadfael. Success and esteem both followed: by the time Pargeter died in 1995, the Cadfael books had readers worldwide and spawned radio and TV adaptations. She had brought her beloved Shropshire and Shrewsbury to life effectively enough to drive tourism to a level that led to some local carping. Cadfael, a man who was familiar with the purposes of pilgrimage, would have understood, if not necessarily approved.

An abbey like Cadfael’s Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul is removed from the world by design, but it can never wholly escape that world’s events. Peters set her series at a truly parlous moment for the kingdom, a period now known as the Anarchy, when King Stephen and his sister, the Empress Maud, spent nearly twenty years fighting back and forth across the kingdom in largely fruitless battle for the throne. For Cadfael and his fellow monks, the war is presented as primarily a source of sorrow at rampant waste, human and material; for Cadfael’s friend Hugh Beringar, the Shrewsbury-based sheriff, it is a constant threat to the lives and livelihoods of the people in his charge as the highest-ranking officer of the king in the region. The larger struggle is at times the impetus, at others merely the backdrop, of the smaller human dramas that involve Cadfael. As with most cozy mysteries, we don’t go to these books for their plots (Donald Westlake once wrote of a confusing bit in a Rex Stout plot, “But no matter, no matter”), though they are always serviceable and can at times surprise; still, the war offers a reliable, convincing engine for setting events into motion.

The research that undergirds Peters’s version of medieval Shrewsbury is largely invisible; like Dorothy Dunnett, but to a less intensely detailed degree, she simply presents a world and the relationships and material that comprise it. In the course of the series we meet knights, jugglers, ladies-in-waiting, coppicers, boatmen, lords, traders, and all manner of the other people who, together, kept the economy and society of medieval England moving. The intricate relationship between the monastery and the town it borders offers continual interest, as through it we glimpse the relationship between church and state at a moment when neither was sure of the other’s wholehearted support.

For all that, it’s Cadfael that is the heart of the series. His biography largely defines him: restless in his youth, he joined the Crusades, fighting for Christianity throughout the Middle East, an experience that made him appreciate the craft of the soldier while doubting the righteousness of his cause. Asked once if he’s not afraid of death, he replies, “I’ve brushed elbows with him before. We respect each other.” His faith wasn’t shaken by the experience, but his belief that a loving God would want it spread through conquest was. He made his way slowly back to England, then chose to take the cowl in his fifties. When we meet him he is comfortably settled, in charge of an herb garden and the medical remedies it supplies. He is happy and confident in his choice, content in the quiet and certainty it offers. Yet his curiosity and taste for adventure remain liable to flare-ups, and when a body turns up (Cadfael has the same proximity-to-death problem Jessica Fletcher would have eight centuries later), he always finagles a way to get involved.

Like Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, Cadfael can at times strike us as too forgiving of human failings, too ready to doubt precept, to accord with our ideas of how a person of that era might think. “Men,” he thinks to himself, “were variable, fallible, and to be humoured.” Yet as Anthony C. Meisel and M. L. del Mastro noted in their introduction to their 1975 translation of The Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule itself—already nearly six hundred years old in Cadfael’s time—is rooted in such common sense:

“Perhaps the greatest strengths of the Rule are its common sense and its evident love and concern for the welfare of the individuals who would embrace it as a way of life. . . . [Benedict] addressed himself not to the hermit or the cleric, but to the layman who knew that no matter how hard he tried he would be a ‘beginner’ for the whole of his life’s pilgrimage. . . . The common life as Benedict envisioned it . . . allowed each man to draw upon the strengths of his brothers to supply for his weaknesses.”

Frequently what we might read as Cadfael’s flouting of the rules is grounded in a deeper belief, one that is perhaps, like a deep-rooted tree that bends with the wind, more powerful for its surface flexibility. “Cadfael was not of the opinion,” Peters writes in The Confession of Brother Haluin, “that a man’s main business in this world was to save his own soul. There are other ailing bodies, in need of a hoist towards health.” Often that hoist requires actions that may not strictly accord with scripture, hew as they might to its larger purposes. Cadfael’s concern can always be located in some combination of a care for justice—“Truth can be costly, but never falls short of value for the price paid”; “Justice has to learn to wait, and not to forget”—and a desire to give people the chance to make the decisions that are right for them in the long term, even if church teaching might argue otherwise in the moment.

Through Cadfael’s eyes we see a medieval world that is simultaneously like ours and not. People follow dreams, struggle against or surrender to urges and passions, forge friendships and enmities, of a sort that we recognize from our own lives. They grumble about their colleagues (in Cadfael’s case, his fellow monks—as centuries of failed utopias attest, communal living is never easy, even when structured by clear rules). Yet they all do so in a world much more ordered and circumscribed than ours, one where every man has a master, and most people can see from birth the path laid out for them. In such a world, an event like an annual summer fair becomes magical, offering opportunities for discovery, transformation, even escape, and through Cadfael’s relationships with high and low, young and old, we come to understand, at least in some attenuated, imagined way, what it might have been like to live in that world. Cadfael’s generosity of spirit and his delight in the dreams and passions of youth are among his most endearing characteristics; we believe in him as a man who has seen the world and is glad of it and for it despite his retirement from personal participation in its striving. His judgments are always fundamentally tempered by hard-won knowledge of the fallibility that Christianity both emphasizes and promises a way, ultimately, to overcome.

Perhaps the moments when the medieval world comes closest to us, however, are when Peters reminds us that, for all his openness to ambiguity and inquiry, Cadfael remains firm in the faith that led him to the monastery. Belief is his bedrock. He prays for help or insight and genuinely hopes to receive it; he holds a special place in his heart and faith for St. Winifred, patron saint of the abbey, and thinks often of her and her miracles. In one book, he and his fellow monks even accept what is basically a trial by faith, a Sortes Sanctorum, as evidence in a murder inquiry. For all that Peters enables us to relate to Cadfael, much as she makes him a man of inquiry, evidence, and rationality, a part of her genius is to nonetheless make him a man of his time.

The other part of her genius—one I’ve felt with particular potency amid the day-to-day turmoil of the past couple of years in American politics and culture—is to have created in Cadfael and twelfth-century Shrewsbury the perfect example of the appeal of the cozy mystery. We turn to cozy series for many of the same reasons that Cadfael took the cowl: a desire for order and a familiar place that will welcome us again and again, unchanging even as we change. For what is a monastery but an enactment of the promise that surface changes don’t matter, that the deeper truths, like those found in the cyclical round of seasons and saint’s days, are eternal? That the friends we make in these series are subject merely to the occasional mystery rather than the unsolvable vagaries of time renders us grateful each time we open another. Yet like Cadfael, we know that we cannot live wholly removed from the world. The abbey, though a lifelong choice for him, is only a viable home if it can be leavened with the occasional experience of interesting strangers and complicated human puzzles that only the outside world can offer. The cozy, for us, can only ever be a temporary escape, a way of ever-so-gently girding our loins for the real-world battles it temporarily lets us forget.

“Happiness,” Cadfael thinks as he floats on the River Severn, “consists in small things, not in great. It is the small things we remember, when time and mortality close in.” Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael series is one of those small, good things. You’d be remiss not to give it a place in your reading life.