Cadfael - Everyman

Everyman

Cadfael is comfortable with Normans as well as Saxons and works across the ethnic divide. He moves easily among the Welsh and the English, speaking both languages, with freemen and villeins, with rich and poor burghers, with members of the low and high aristocracy, within the tribal and feudal communities, church hierarchies and secular; he talks freely with kings and princes. He travelled extensively in Muslim lands and voices respect for their culture and people. He lived with a Muslim woman and journeyed as a sailor. When a villein addresses him as "Master", Cadfael promptly corrects him: "No man's master, every man's brother, if you will."

He is neutral in political matters, refusing to take sides in the civil war between the Empress Maud and King Stephen for control of England. His abjuration of politics is influenced by his holy vows as a monastic brother, but also comes of having fought and seen destruction by political will during the crusades. Cadfael is on good terms with people on both sides of the English war; his best friend Hugh is a staunch supporter of King Stephen, and his son Olivier is just as much committed to the Empress Maud. Cadfael explains his neutrality by saying "In my measure there's little to choose between two such monarchs, but much to be said for keeping a man's fealty and word." When witnessing a failed peace conference, Cadfael forms the opinion that Maud's half-brother Robert would have made a better monarch then both of them, but for his illegitimate birth (which would not have debarred Robert in Wales, with its law having a different definition of a bastard). However, Cadfael keeps this opinion to himself.

Cadfael has close contacts with the other Welsh people living in Shrewsbury including the boatman Madog, who has an important role in several books. Cadfael likes to speak in Welsh, is exuberant when getting an opportunity to go back into Wales, and feels closer to many Welsh ways of doing things than Anglo-Norman ways: for example, letting all of a man's acknowledged children, whether born in or out of wedlock, share in his inheritance; and recognizing degrees of crime, including homicide, which allows leniency to killers in certain circumstances, rather than the inflexibly mandatory capital punishment of Norman Law, administered reluctantly by Hugh Beringar and rigidly by his superior, Sheriff Gilbert Prestcote. Cadfael has, however, voluntarily chosen to join an English monastery rather than a Welsh one, and make his home in England – although close to the borders with Wales - his secular history having made him too cosmopolitan to blend in his own homeland. As a Welshman in England, and in concord with his vows, he remains in the world, yet not of it.