O Rare Ellis Peters: Two Rules for Medieval Murder

Summary

Thereafter, on occasions and for what he feels to be good reasons, he may break the rules. He will never transgress against the Rule, and never abandon it.

Ellis Peters, “Introduction,” A Rare Benedictine

Edith Pargeter, a professional writer of copious invention and range with more than fifty novels to her credit, invented the nom de plume of Ellis Peters primarily for the writing of mysteries. Her first ten featured the English policeman, Inspector Felse, and his family; but the eleventh, A Morbid Taste for Bones, published in London in 1977, introduced a new kind of investigator: Cadfael ap Meilyr ap Dafydd, a twelfth-century monk in an abbey in Shrewsbury, in Shropshire on the Welsh borders. She never called it a “project of medievalism,” but that is what it was.

One must begin, and probably end, with what Pargeter knew about medieval Wales and England and the medieval world. Although it is clear that she kenned the matter of the histories that are drawn upon and worked into her medieval stories, when she discusses her sources she begins by characterizing such knowledge not as a subject matter in an academic or theoretical structure, but as a richness of experience, geography, curiosity, and memory. She had no intentions of writing an autobiography, or even a thinly disguised autobiographical novel. What her intentions actually were are best revealed in a charming volume, Shropshire. A Memoir of the English Countryside, where she writes about the county of Shropshire, including its medieval history, and makes clear on every page her knowledge and love of that region:

I can think of places in other counties, other countries, where I can imagine being happy every moment of the day and night. But none of them displaces this vague circle of earth, three miles or so in diameter, in which I have lived, or at least made my base, all my life. I can travel joyfully to any of my favourite haunts abroad, but only to this place can I come home. It can even be a love–hate relationship between us, but it is a powerful compulsion, strong enough to pull me back across the world from any earthly paradise. Other places can be where I exult and wonder. This is where I put my feet up and thank God.