The potter's field : the seventeenth chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury

The two monasteries are quick to seal the deal once they decide to trade two plots of land at Saint Peter's Fair in August 1143. By early October, the monks of the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul are in the newly acquired Potter's Field, setting the plough with a huge team of oxen to till the long fallow land. Soon into the work, they stop, having found what they least expect: the bones and long dark hair of a woman in her unblessed and unmarked grave. She has no marks of identity besides her hair, nor wounds to her bones to tell how she died. She held a cross made from twigs, the only sign she had been laid there by someone who wished her well. The civil authority and the monks must learn who she was, and how she came to her death.The field was a gift from the lord of Longner Manor to the Augustine Priory at Haughmond Abbey, who then traded it to the Shrewsbury Abbey, as it was closer to them. For fifteen years, until fifteen months earlier, it was the home of a potter, Ruald and his wife Generys. Ruald is now a happy man in the monastery, finding his true calling. His wife is no longer in the area, abandoned by her husband's decision, not free to marry again, and not happy about her situation. Sulien Blount, novice monk, reports to Abbot Radulfus of the devastation of Ramsey Abbey, having survived the long walk. Learning of the local mystery, he shares the news that Generys was seen within the last three weeks, having sold her wedding ring to a silversmith in Peterborough as she and her new man flee the devastation of the Fens. Sulien shows the ring, given him for his sentimental attachment. This rules her out as the unfortunate woman now buried in the Abbey's cemetery, and frees Ruald of suspicion of being a murderer. In October of 1142, a local landlord makes a present of the Potter's Field to the local clergy. This substantial meadow, previously owned by a potter called Ruald and his lovely young wife, is transferred to the Benedictine Abby of St. Peter and St. Paul in August of 1143. Shortly afterward the Benedictine monks begin to plow it. The plow turns up the long raven tresses of a young woman, dead a year or more; even Brother Cadfael, herbalist and student of medicine, cannot say how long. The body brings with it complex and delicate problems, for Ruald had abandoned his beautiful wife Generys to take monastic vows, and she was believed to have gone away secretly with a new lover. It seems likely that the dead woman is Generys, and that someone has murdered her. With the arrival at the Abbey of young Sulien Blount, a novice fleeing homeward from an abby ravaged by the civil war raging in East Anglia, the mysteries surrounding the corpse start to muliply. In the Seventeenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael the medieval scholarship is everywhere present, but it is the plot that dominates--an intricate mystery with a most sensational and unexpected outcome. EDITORIAL REVIEW: In October of 1142, a local landlord gives the Potter's Field to the local clergy. The monks begin to plow it, and the blades turn up the long tresses of a young woman, dead over a year. Then the arrival of a novice who fled from an abbey ravaged by civil war in East Anglia complicates life even further for Brother Cadfael. HC: Mysterious Press. Fiction,Historical,General,Historical - General,Mystery & Detective,Suspense,History,Mystery & Detective - General,Great Britain,Detective,Fiction - Mystery,Traditional British,Mystery & Detective - Traditional British,Mystery,Cadfael; Brother (Fictitious character),Stephen; 1135-1154,Shrewsbury (England) Saint Peter's Fair of that year, 1143, was one week past, and they were settling down again into the ordinary routine of a dry and favorable August, with the corn harvest already being carted into the barns, when Brother Matthew the cellarer first brought into chapter the matter of business he had been discussing for some days during the fair with the prior of the Augustine priory of Saint John the Evangelist, at Haughmond, about four miles to the northeast of Shrewsbury. August, 1143. The body of a woman is unearthed in the freshly plowed fields that once belonged to a local potter -- now a Benedictine monk. The woman is revealed to be his beautiful young wife, thought to have run away. Medieval Benedictine monk Brother Cadfael must determine if one of his own order is guilty of the crime. Brother Cadfael becomes involved in a mystery when the corpse of a young woman is plowed up in a potter's field in 1143