Cadfael - Background

Background

Cadfael, the central character of the Cadfael Chronicles, is a Benedictine monk and herbalist at Shrewsbury Abbey in Shrewsbury, the county town of the English county of Shropshire. Cadfael himself is a Welshman and uses patronymics in the Welsh fashion, naming himself Cadfael ap Meilyr ap Dafydd (Cadfael son of Meilyr son of Dafydd) as his full name.

He was born in May 1080 into a villein community in Trefriw, Conwy, in North Wales, and had at least one sibling, a younger brother. 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. In 1096, he embarked on the First Crusade to the Holy Land in the force commanded by Robert II, Duke of Normandy. After the victorious end to the Crusade, he lived for several years in Syria and the Holy Land, earning a living as a sailor, before returning to England around 1114 to find that Richildis Vaughan, to whom he had been unofficially engaged, had tired of waiting and had married Eward Gurney, a Shrewsbury craftsman. Cadfael became a man at arms (foot soldier) in the war waged by Henry I of England to secure the union with Normandy, and returned again to England in the service of a nobleman, Roger Mauduit, who kidnapped Prior Heribert of Shrewsbury Abbey in an attempt to foil a lawsuit. Cadfael freed Heribert and, being released from Mauduit's service, laid aside his arms and proceeded with Heribert to Shrewsbury Abbey.

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. I've seen men killed in battle. Come to that, I've killed men in battle. I never took joy in it, that I can remember, but I never drew back from it either. I was with Robert of Normandy's company and a mongrel lot we were, Britons, Normans, Flemings, Scots, Bretons - name them, they were there! After the city was settled and Baldwin crowned, most of us went home over three or four years, but I had taken to the sea by then, and I stayed. There were pirates ranged those coasts, we always had work to do. I served as a free man-at-arms for a while, and then I was ripe, and it was time. But I had had my way in the world. I grow herbs and dry them and make remedies for all the ills that visit us. To heal men, after years of injuring them? What could be more fitting? A man does what he must do."