Saint Cadog seems to have behaved with the unforgiving ferocity ofmost of his kind, at least in legend. My monk had to be a man of wideworldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerancefor the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with allits enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from thebeginning. Only later did readers begin to wonder and ask about hisformer roving life, and how and why he became a monk.

For reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and writea book about his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, theentire sequence of novels proceeds steadily season by season, year byyear, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. Butwhen I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a shortstory, to shed light on his vocation, I was glad to use it.

So here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an ageof relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented bycantankerous schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always beenan unquestioning believer. What happens to him on the road toWoodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within thatthe life he has lived to date, active, mobile and often violent, hasreached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and adifferent challenge.

In India it is not unknown for a man who has possessed great powerand wealth to discard everything when he reaches a certainage—recognisable to him when it comes not by dates and times,but by an inward certainty—put on the yellow robe of asannyasi, and go away with nothing but a begging bowl, at once intothe world and out of it.

Given the difference in climate and tradition between the saffronrobe and the voluminous black habit, the solitary with the wildernessfor his cloister, and the wall suddenly enclosing and embracing thetraveller over half the world, that is pretty much what Cadfael doesin entering the Rule of Saint Benedict in the Abbey of Saint Peterand Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury.