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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An amazing visit to the 12th Century, July 20, 2002
I enjoy a good murder mystery of the classical type, and the Brother Cadfael series is particularly good. The author Ellis Peters (Edith Pargiter, 1913-1995), like Agatha Christie, Nagio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers, was popular during the mid-20th Century and wrote prolifically during that time. There are some 20 Cadfael books. The film A Morbid Taste for Bones, based upon the book of the same name is incredibly authentic and colorful. The different orders of society: nobleman, servant, military man, tradesman, artisan, abbott, monk, and priest are carefully wrought to produce a period piece with more detail and clearer dialogue than a Shakespearean play. It would be a wonderful way of introducing young people to history. The setting of the story is 12th Century England, a period of particular turmoil. Henry I had died without a legitimate male heir, and he had designated his daughter Matilda as his successor, binding his nobles by oath to support her. Although many of them did, including her very able half brother, an illegitimate son of Henry made an Earl by his father, many of them threw their support behind her cousin, Steven. Matilda, or Maud as she is referred to, was a granddaughter of William the Conqueror and no push over herself. She fought her cousin from a base in coastal France, where the family held land in fief of the King of France and where marriage alliances had placed her as wife of Geoffery, the Duke of Anjou. With her Norman support in France and her loyal factions in England, she made enough of a threat to Steven's rule to ultimately obtain a guarantee of succession to the English throne for her son Henry, ultimately Henry II. Until that time, warfare turned most of England into a battle ground and life for everyone a matter of ceaseless uncertainty. Added to this was the rancour still apparent in the social divisions between the largely Saxon population and their Norman rulers. The fall of the Saxon monarchy was only a hundred years previous and hostility still existed. Cadfael, the central character of the series, is a Dominican monk and herbalist, and Dereck Jacobi is the perfect personification of him. He has a presence which suggests strength, wisdom, and compassion. Unlike most of the other brothers, Cadfael had spent most of his life in the secular world where he participated in the crusades, had adventures, fell in and out of love, and took his order after finding the ways of the world wanting. He comes from a different culture, that of Wales, and sees that of England through an outsiders more objective eyes. His experience with life and the motives of men and his keen awareness of detail makes him the perfect sleuth, and when murder is committed, the civil authorities, often personified by Hugh Beringer (Eorin McCarthy), are more than willing to have him clear things up for them. In A Morbid Taste for Bones, a young priest begins having ecstatic seizures in which he believes he is being directed by a Welsh saint, the martyred St. Winifred, to go to Wales to obtain her bones for the Abbey of Shrewsbury. The people of the town are loath to give up their saint, and in the process of convincing them of the divine direction of their mission, the monks end up suspected of the murder of a townsman. Cadfael, a Welshman himself, begins the process of sleuthing out the culprit before they and their mission become victims themselves. A thoroughly real and well researched visit to the Middle Ages.
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DVD ~ Derek Jacobi
DVD ~ Derek Jacobi
DVD ~ Derek Jacobi
DVD ~ Derek Jacobi
DVD ~ Derek Jacobi
