A boy fleeing from "justice" at the hands of a lynch-mob - mostly young men who have spent the evening drinking at a wedding feast - manages to get into the abbey church. There, he has the right of sanctuary for forty days.
Brother Cadfael, having talked to the boy, decides that he could not have committed the murder of which he is accused, and determines to prove his innocence.
Then the murder turns out to have been only attempted murder (though no less serious for that, and still a hanging offence) and the victim, a rich miser with a grown-up daughter whom he delights in treating as an unpaid servant, is still very much alive and bemoaning the gold stolen from him by the murderer. But then a second murder is committed.
As usual in the Brother Cadfael books, there is young love to be fostered through dangers and difficulties, with the boy the one acccused of the crime - in the preceding book Joscelin and Iveta, in this book Liliwin and Rannilt. Only in the present book, there are what look like two great loves-between-losers: one which seems doomed to turn out tragically, but does not, and the other, which does.
Perhaps the best Brother Cadfael Mystery of all.
JM
THE SANCTUARY SPARROW
Ellis Peters
Medieval Magic and Mystery
> monks, a great abbey, sacred relics
> the right of sanctuary
Medieval Outsiders
> a thin, homeless boy-acrobat, dressed in tattered motley
> a Welsh girl, "a kinless kitchen slave", in the house of a rich merchant family in Shrewsbury
