The Servant's Tale

For those who have not previously come across Margaret Frazer's medieval mystery series detailing the always-authentically-medieval exploits of the Benedictine Sister Frevisse, I can only say by way of introduction that these novels are definitely the closest any writer has ever come to matching Ellis Peters' Cadfael books (eg A Morbid Taste For Bones), the sleuth being a nun instead of a monk, but quite as sharp and eccentric and understanding and endearing - and with an unexpected past outside the cloister, just as Brother Cadfael has. There is also a hint of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple about Dame Frevisse: an "interfering woman", she manages to remain at least outwardly humble, while being always politely right; the male authority-figure - in the shape this time of the King's Crowner for southern Oxfordshire - "an arrogant fool who resisted any help anyone tried to give him, especially women, and most especially cloistered nuns."

I have chosen this particular book from the series to review here, partly because it features some special favourites of mine from the Middle Ages: those cultured but landless (and often lordless) outsiders who wandered the country as vagabond "players"; and secondly because this is the novel where Margaret Frazer introduces Joliffe, a player who reappears in subsequent stories but makes his debut here as the main suspect for two murders.

When the book opens, it is mid-winter and freezing cold and a peasant woman is waiting in her leaky one-room hovel for a her drunken husband to return from a three-day trip. We learn that she has two sons, the elder just like his father, the younger a sweeter and brighter boy whom she hopes and prays will become a priest. To this end she has saved the halfpences she receives for working as a servant at the local nunnery, St Frideswide's (home of Dame Frevisse) and has had the boy taught his letters by the local priest.

Then news comes that the husband turned his waggon over in a ditch and has been seriously injured. Some players who happened to pass by have taken him to the convent.

Is there anything suspicious in his death? Perhaps, perhaps not. There certainly is in the two deaths that follow.

One of the things I enjoyed was learning more about Sister Frevisse: that not only was Geoffrey Chaucer her great-uncle, and she had been brought up partly in the home of Chaucer's son, Thomas, but that her parents had been wandering folk and she herself, when she was small, had known life on the road: hence her great need to defend Joliffe and the other players - but is she letting her emotions blind her to the truth?

Very much recommended and you can start here if you have never read any other books in the series.