Cadfael (1994) s00e00 Episode Script
Decoding Cadfael
Brother Cadfael, the cloistered cluesmith of 12th century Shrewsbury, was the literary creation of historical author Edith Pargeter, writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Peters.
In 1994 Cadfael was lifted off the page and into our television sets by the incredibly modest hero of stage and screen, sir Derek Jacobi.
His monkish ministerings in a medieval world amidst anarchy and its agonies brought a different dimension to itv, the habitual home of detective drama.
Look at this bruise here.
If he drowned, I would say he was held down less by drink, than by something harsh and heavy pressing on his neck.
It was wonderful to do, a marvelous character to play.
- Is it over? - His penance is complete.
You try to put yourself back into a time when existence was hard, when life was cheap.
Life as a 12th century monk was, I would imagine, a hard one.
I imagine you were hungry a lot of the time, and you were cold a lot of the time, it was only the company of men, you never saw anything of the world, your ideas where the world were very closeted in clothes, and so somebody like Cadfael coming into the midst of that, a man who'd been out and fought, in the Crusades, and to meet someone and hear that person's stories is like a revelation, just unbelievable, you know.
Cadfael had taken up the cowl at the age of 40, with Edith Pargeter discovering him as he was nearing 60.
The year was 1137, and England was in turmoil, as the battles for sovereignty between King Stephen and Empress Maud raged across the land.
Cadfael's years of fighting in the Crusades across the Middle East gave him an understanding that made him a very unusual monk.
He was this contemplative, had been for, I think, sixteen, seventeen years in the monastery, and But he'd been a man of the world, he'd kicked around, he had killed, he had murdered, he had slain.
And that had left its mark on him.
Cadfael's previous life, I think, is an important part of Edith's character, because it made him somebody who understood the world.
He had been in the world, he had fathered a son.
He had knowledge.
I have stood on the field of battle, my armour smoking with the blood of the fallen, and felt nothing.
Such is war's harvest after the first death.
No other reaches your heart.
He had knowledge of humankind, knowledge of the way minds work, knowledge of relationships, which he acquired before he went into the monastry.
When the television series first aired in 1994, Edith had already published 19 Cadfael novels and three short stories.
The character she'd invented was complex and multifaceted, and stamped a strong impression upon her readers.
The books are so evocative, that I think everyone has a very clear image, of what Cadfael is to them, and okay, everyone's image is slightly different, but at the heart of it is this ruggedness, this strength, this feeling that you wouldn't want to meet the man in a fight.
I imagine him as being powerful, fairly handsome but not beautiful, and quiet yet strong in character.
I see him as being a very pleasant open-faced man, but strong, and active, very agile, and I see him as having extremely intelligent lively eyes, very perceptive, and yet able to keep his counsel.
A good poker player, I would've thought.
I'd describe brother Cadfael as first and foremost a man of god.
Everything that he does and thinks is guided by his religious faith.
Cadfael's shrewd a perceptive nature would be central to his role as a detective, but would also throw open the doors to conflict and comradeship amongst the monks that cohabited the world of Edith Pargeter's 12th century monastery.
As far as prior Robert was concerned, he didn't like Cadfael.
I mean, he just found Cadfael a pain in the ass.
You have found no murderer, and half your time is gone.
He saw a herbalist, such people are useful, but they're hardly to be revered above the church.
Prior Robert was sort of a pompous, vain, deluded, person.
He had, you know, he had a capacity to care, but he was quite hoisted on his own vanity.
And I think that's something that Jerome quite liked, they were safe with each other, because they shared similar delusions.
He was my sneak, he was my undercover agent who would find out what was going on when I couldn't be there.
Our valued brother once again visited, and spoke with, the widow.
I think Jerome just saw everybody as objects to to be disciplined.
To cherish this in your bed, is close to fornication.
I think he had so many hang-ups himself, he would get rid of those insecurities by stuff like pointing the finger at other people, and Oswin is the perfect person to be bullied, you know, he's an easy target.
Brother Cadfael told brother Porter that you were headed to the horse fare stables.
Can't remember, brother.
Brother Oswin, idiot, annoying.
He was a boy, he wasn't quite used to how his body worked, he was one of those awkward teenagers, unbearably shy and uncomfortable, socially.
I certainly think that Oswin loved Cadfael as he would love a father, because he couldn't have wished for a better influence.
Imagine if he'd fallen under the auspices of prior Robert and Jeremy, he would have turned in some sort of psychopath.
Ever since brother Oswin first came to our house, he's been as a son to me.
I should never have left him alone with evil.
I must put it right.
And if I order against it? Radulfus respected and trusted Cadfael, but he wanted Cadfael to do as he was told, but always realized that Cadfael made the right choices in the end.
After the break, from the Crusades to the cloisters, the inspiration behind Ellis Peters' cowled character.
Brother Cadfael was brought to life on ITV in September 1994.
Derek Jacobi inhabited the character with an attention to detail and understanding that few others could have brought to the fold.
A rope stretched between two trees of a certain height could fetch a man of his mount.
But there's more than the mark of a rope on his neck, bruises too.
But it had already been almost 20 years since brother Cadfael had first entered the mind of historical novelist Edith Pargeter, who herself was in her 60s when he arrived at the end of her pen.
Edith was coming to these novels, not as something that had just been plucked out of the air, but as a result of a very long career as a writer.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
She was a professional.
And professional writers just get on with the job.
She loved the writing.
Writing really really mattered a lot to her.
And she knew she was good at it.
And she also had this delicious stubbornness too, so that you never felt that you were in the presence of someone who could be in any way veered off of what they wanted to do.
She did what she did and we were the ones who got a word perfect manuscript.
Born in Shropshire in 1913, Edith always knew she would write.
Her first acclaimed full-length novel was published just before the war in 1939, and would be the first of more than 70 books in her lifetime, combining styles between historical novels and contemporary mysteries, she perfected her art.
We'd published her "Brothers of Gwynedd", a huge historical quartet, which in a way was similar to her first great historical work, the "Heaven tree" trilogy, which was published back in the 60s.
It was set in the 12th-13th century, and they were a mixture of very very well researched history of that period, and of the civil wars that raged across the border, but they were also romances.
And she had, she did have a very soft heart for a good romance, and I always have had the feeling that Cadfael came out of those books.
She always used to say that he found her, she didn't find him.
The man you accuse is absolutely clear of this, even if it were murder, he's here in sanctuary.
Be ashamed to make such senseless charges.
The idea of a sleuthing monk seemed to bring together the two aspects that she'd been writing up to that point.
We used to publish an annual anthology called "Winter's Crimes" and we used to commission short stories.
And Edith had submitted an historical short story.
Not medieval, interesting, it was Roman.
But when she sent this in and I was talking to her about it, I said, Have you ever thought of writing an historical mystery? And she said, Yes, I've been thinking about it.
And about six months later, "A morbid taste for bones" arrived.
And I though it wonderful.
I've owned Owen and Blakeway, that is the "History of Shrewsbury" in two volumes, one secular, and one the church history, since I was fifteen, and I know it pretty well.
But just in dipping into it again, I got to the part where the prior of Shrewsbury Abbey takes a party of monks into Wales, to find the relics of Saint Winifred, and bring them back to enhance the status of Shrewsbury Abbey.
And it struck me that it would make a wonderful plot for a thriller, because they could get rid of a corpse which really had to disappear totally by putting it in the reliquary meant for the Saint, bringing him back to sit on an altar, I'm afraid, in Shrewsbury.
So it was always really out of Shrewsbury's genuine history.
I think she knew pretty early on that she had stumbled onto a very very special person.
I wanted him to have a very wide and deep understanding of human nature, to have been through quite a number of minor sins that inirate himself, so that he can understand sinners, and not to have the narrow cloistral view of humanity, which a child brought up as a monk, or an apprentice from five years old might very well take a different view from him.
He has to have compassion.
Whatever she did, came from something within her, which might have been best if it had not been maimed.
She was much wronged.
It's a complicated thing for me to talk about Cadfael, because I see so much of Edith in this character.
She just portrayed a very human person with weaknesses and doubts, and huge strengths, and of course the wisdom.
And for me Edith exuded wisdom that came from real life.
Edith believed that real wisdom comes from getting in there and living it, and Cadfael had lived it.
I think I have the better of you, brother.
And I think we should both have died.
I think the fact that Cadfael has a past, and we return to it and gradually learn about it through the books, is one of the ways that Edith gave depth to the series.
They would be very formulaic if you every time had somebody died and Cadfael does the investigation and solves it and that's all there is.
But the richness that we get through him being an unusual monk, in that he has been a soldier in the past, helps him to be a good detective of course, but it's also, it's part of the narrative.
Having created, or tried to create, to project myself into, a Benedictine monk, a genuine one, with a real vocation, then I have to try and fit my mind into his, and speak through him.
But also I can't put anything into him that I don't feel myself.
So you may draw conclusions about how I feel about justice, about compassion, about religion too.
I share my thoughts with god alone.
Published in 1977, "A morbid taste for bones" had been written as a one-off murder mystery, set against a backdrop of war in medieval England and Wales.
But the fascinating combination of a sleuthing monk and the anarchic setting, was just too tempting for Edith, writing as Ellis Peters, to resist.
I never intended it at the beginning to be a series.
It was strictly a one-off, "A morbid taste for bones".
And then I kept thinking, well, the very year after that, was the siege of Shrewsbury, when the entire garrison were hanged by King Stephen after he took the castle.
And there must be a plot somewhere there, and that was the beginning of course of "One corpse too many".
And by the time that one was finished I found I developed the appetite to go on with it.
That second novel was the inspiration that Edith needed to continue her writing.
Occasionally you see an historical novel where the author has obviously got the plot, and he's got the period, and sort of dumps the two together more or less.
But the wonderful thing about the Cadfaels is that everything hinges on everything else.
If you take away the murder method, you haven't got a story.
If you take away the setting, the murder method won't work.
If you take away the identity of the murder, then nothing works.
And that really appeals to me, that's first-class writing.
What comes through for me is her political side.
She was, especially in her youth, extraordinarily left-wing.
I think she's seen as a kind of cozy lady in a cardigan writing about people in tights.
But that is not Edith at all.
She was passionate, and that comes through in the books, in Cadfael particularly.
His morality, the times when he struggles against authority, which he does, throughout the series.
All I'm saying is, I think it's a pity, and I'll put it no stronger than that.
But I think it's a pity you let all the pilgrims just walk out of the room.
I should have kept them locked up here, where they have no right to be in the first place? Given there might have been a murderer among them it could have been a good idea.
As Edith approached her 70th year, the Cadfael novels kept on coming.
She produced two books a year in the early 1980s, but despite critical acclaim was finding it difficult to break into the big-time.
For the most really weird thing is we could not sell the rights to the paperback.
We were not quite giving them away, but we were getting to that point.
And so Futura bought them, and I think I'm right in saying they bought the first seven titles for five hundred pounds each.
I wanted to publish Ellis Peters, and I couldn't quite think how to publish her successfully in paperback, because I thought that the medieval background was actually a disadvantage, that people mostly wanted contemporary mysteries.
And then "The name of the rose" was published, and then became a great success in film with Sean Connery as the lead character.
And I suddenly realized that the medieval element was actually a selling point, and not a negative.
And we published them with medieval style covers.
And they were a success immediately and started selling in very large numbers, and for the first time, the age of about 65, Ellis Peters hit the bestseller list.
By the mid 1980s, Ellis Peters' Cadfael had struck a chord at the heart of the readership, and when something's that popular, there's always someone wanting to make more of the character.
"Monk's hood" by Ellis Peters, dramatized for radio by Bert Coules.
The things that appealed to me as being suitable for radio were really the things that makes the books so incredibly popular.
The character of Cadfael himself obviously, a wonderful, well-rounded, interesting character, the world, the glimpse into a world that not many people know about, and perhaps of more than all of those, the atmosphere.
The radio is very good at suggesting atmosphere with fairly minimal means.
Brother Cadfael, herbalist and garden keeper of the Benedictine abbey of St.
Peter and St.
Paul in Shrewsbury, came to chapter in tranquility.
- Good morning, brother Cadfael.
- Good morning.
Philip Madoc is, was, and still is, indeed, the perfect casting.
He's Welsh, he's rugged, he's totally believable, as a man who's done all these things as a crusader, you can see Philip in armour fighting for the cross, you can see him at sea standing in the prow of his boat, and you could also see him pottering about his herb garden, come to contentment, as the phrase is.
What troubles you, Cadfael? Father abbot, I was thinking that even God can't make peaceful creatures out of men without some support from his raw material.
Two things combined make it a unique part.
You have the chance of playing a man who already is mature.
I was coming into a new kind of experience.
And the story, which is a whodunit, but it's a whodunit in a special period.
On top of that of course, the man is a Welshman, and I think that what appealed to me was the fact that he was obviously very different.
In a way he was a kind of renegade, but not just because he had been a soldier, all those lives in turn to the holy church, but because he was a Welshman from over the border of Shrewsbury.
The Welsh elements of the novels were hugely important to Edith, but it would be the characters she created that sparked interest from central TV in the early 1990s.
Director of programs at Central Television had told the head of drama, Ted Giles, that his wife was a great fan.
So I got hold of all the books, and I was very engaged by the characters in it.
And I said I thought there was a series in it, and that we should see whether we could do it for ITV.
I remember we made a trip up to Iron Bridge, where Edith lived then, she was interested and, you know, asked some pertinent questions, and we talked about it all over lunch, and I think she sort of did say reluctantly, but, you know, kind of sort of mature and reasoned approach, and anyway the upshot of it was that we decided to go forward.
She never once said to me, I'm not sure I want this.
I think she was very curious and thought it would be a lovely thing to see.
I am very excited about it, I hope it will take place quickly, so that I can really see what can be made of it on screen.
It is a very good prospect, because, provided we get the right man, I think it could be very good.
With Edith's permission to proceed, there were still doubts from within the ITV as to the appeal of a medieval detective.
People who live in medieval times, ruled by fear of the devil and love of God, all the sort of things that contemporary audiences don't have a great deal of sympathy with.
And the stories very much rely upon that.
On the other hand they also have completely contemporary elements of detective fiction and romantic fiction melded together in Edith Pargeter's stories.
And those are what ITV and we thought would be able to make them accessible to the contemporary television audience.
- This is hemlock.
- It is indeed.
I don't need it, and you shouldn't be so free in selling it.
I only sell such wares to those who are careful.
Careful? Your wares can kill! Once the first script was written, my task was to find out how on earth we could make it for the money that's available to make an ITV series.
I worked out that the only way we could afford to do it was to build the world out of wooden plaster, because in Britain basically most of the elements that we require for the stories are in ruins.
We needed them as they were freshly built in the 12th century.
The two places that we could possibly afford were Poland and Hungary.
I chose Hungary for various practical reasons, and we built all the world on the back lot and on the stages of a very crumbling studio in Budapest.
In the belief that the Cadfael project could succeed, it was important to find the perfect player for the part.
The nature of the story was that you needed a very compelling and able actor to play the part of brother Cadfael because he was the central figure in the piece.
It's been a secret up till now, but I suppose I can say that our first choice originally for Cadfael was Ian Holmes.
And Ian Holmes accepted the role, but ITV took so much time to make up its mind to do it, that he got bored of waiting and went away.
We then thought long and hard about who to replace him with, and were delighted to be able to entice Derek to the role.
They said we'd like you to meet Edith Pargeter in order to get her approval of you.
And Edith definitely wanted to meet him, and I think he definitely wanted to meet her, because he understood that Edith and Cadfael were joined at the hip.
She kind of looked me up and down, and was very appraising all through lunch, and she didn't give anything away, she played cards very close to her chest, and it was at the end of lunch, she said, I think you'll be a lovely Cadfael.
I think Edith really really was pleased with the choice of Cadfael.
And that is as it should be.
She wrote to me, I shall be going to Budapest late in September, just to see a couple of days filming.
I'm delighted to have Derek Jacobi.
I met him a few weeks ago, and we got on well.
I think he would be very good.
After the break, herbs and hangings in Hungary, brother Cadfael springs to life.
In September 1994, sir Derek Jacobi gave life to Edith Pargeters' brother Cadfael in the form of a sleuthing monk, living in the dark and dangerous world of medieval England.
He clawed at the cord that was killing him.
His hands were free.
Did you hang any whose hands were not tied? He was such a multi-layered character, he was this man of action, this man of the world, and then this celibate, contemplative man.
That combination was fascinating to try to act.
In bringing the author's creation to the screen, it was important to remain true to the essence of her literary characters.
Edith was keen for them to be adapted, but she was keen for them to be adapted faithfully.
To go from book to dramatization requires a writer who gets the essence of the book, and the essence of the story, and turns it into a completely different medium.
Well, I'd read them as a fan, you know, years earlier.
The very first one I read was "One corpse too many".
And so it was a lovely surprise to be asked to be involved in it.
In the first series, there were to be four of Edith's novels adapted for the screen.
Each had its own peculiarities, and Russell Lewis was careful to ensure that the author would not be upset by his interpretations of her work.
I think I've always tried to be faithful to her intent.
I felt as long as I was doing that, I was alright.
Nine times out of the ten changes were made were purely driven by the necessity of production.
We only had a certain amount of minutes that we could tell the story in.
And a certain amount of characters that we could find screen time for.
So some subplots would occasionally go.
With the scripts ongoing, ensuring authenticity to the era in which this medieval monk was ministering his mysteries would also be a challenge.
Because of the period of Cadfael, very little, if anything, exists from that period, and certainly in Hungary, there was nothing that was appropriate to England in the 12th century.
Every single thing that you see in the background of the actors there was all had to be thought about, costed, drawn, and built.
I remember going to the set for the first time and it just taking my breath away.
We were astonished to see this abbey.
It was extraordinary.
It looked beautiful.
It was proper You thought it was real.
Although it was quite a new looking abbey, as it would've been because it was a relative new abby, you know, You went into it and you really did think you were entering the house of god.
It had an extraordinary atmosphere.
And it was lovely to work in there, because you really felt I mean it was just like being in here.
There's really no difference.
And then you were knocked on the pillar, and it was polystyrene there.
Walking into those rooms, I immediately kind of began to create a sense of the world in which this character was living.
Whatever the effect, brother Jerome, your intention was murder.
And your soul stands in peril.
Return to your cell.
You'll leave it only for your punishment.
It was so authentic that of course you felt your job was done for you in a way, all you had to do was learn the lines, put the costume on, and say a few words, and people would believe it.
And brother shall deliver brother to death.
This has meaning for someone here.
Director Graham Theakston was responsible for ensuring that the overall feel of the series was true to the era.
I kind of took on board the fact that probably the dialogue was historically correct for the kind of genre we were playing with, and also that the sets were historically correct too, I kind of believed the designer knew enough to be authentic in that sense.
So I guess what I was looking for was to make these things emotional, and to use the time, and the period, and the sets, and the landscape, and the costumes, and things like that, to try and make people engage with the story.
- Don't! - No! The look of Cadfael is determined.
by the light sources that were pervading at the time.
A medieval world is a very dark world.
It's either day light or no light at all.
The scripts also work pretty dark, I mean they did involve murders in pretty sort of basic circumstances, so what I wanted was not to do a chocolate box version of the 12th century.
King Stephen's siege of Shrewsbury Abbey in August 1138 is the fact around which Edith Pargeter based her second novel, "One corpse to many".
And the story provided a highly dramatic opener for the series.
I am charged by his grace king Stephen to demand your immediate surrender.
Let the bastard rant all he will.
We do not kneel before thieves and usurpers.
But the success of the series would hinge on what sir Derek Jacobi could bring to the viewers with his interpretation of Edith's character.
Sir Derek Jacobi is an extremely fine actor, that's an obvious thing to say, but he brings so many layers to his performances.
I know a decent man is dead.
I know a young girl nearly drowned.
I know death is following those relics, and I beg you, father, before someone else dies, decide who is to have them.
He has that wonderful ability to be there and suggest so many things that are a background in his character's life.
I was in the world forty years before I took this discipline for my cue.
I've been soldier, sailor, and sinner.
You got the Cadfael, the man that he is now, in the Abbey, but you can feel underneath, all that what he's been through, and the appalling sights he must have seen.
But what he brings with him too is a gentleness, that just sort of pours out of him.
There's a sort of goodness.
He's a gentle man.
No man is measured by the love he gives to others, but by how much he is loved.
He's so physically eloquent, you know, he doesn't have to do much to tell you a story about what the code says to play the subtext, and that's why he is so great.
Enough! Derek is fantastic in the role, I mean the role, as the name suggests, is actually Welsh.
Derek by no stretch of the imagination is Welsh, didn't try to pretend to be Welsh, but what he did do is latch on to the burning sense of integrity and the need for justice and the need for searching out what was right, which is what I think Edith liked about the way that he portrays the role.
I approve and endorsed the law of Wales, which says that a son born out of wedlock may inherit.
But not a son who has murdered his father.
Although she was in her early 80s, Edith Pargeter made a trip out to Hungary to witness firsthand how her creation was taking shape on film.
She loved watching the actors speaking some of her words.
She seemed very happy, and she was particularly happy by Derek Jacobi's representation of her character.
I think she thought he was brother Cadfael.
She really enjoyed it.
She loved being there.
I don't think she quite could quite believe what was going on, you know.
She wrote to me when she got back, "The break in Budapest was wonderful.
Very enlightening about how the film world proceeds in ordered chaos.
I found it unexpectedly attractive.
I loved every minute, and feel very hopeful about the results.
Derek will be splendid.
His own niceness comes through, and I very much like some of the young people.
Unknown names, but invariably nice folk.
" I did meet Edith once and it was wonderful because she was lovely and eccentric and exactly how I wanted her to be.
She was great, she was really nice, and she was talking about Oswin, and she went, "Don't let them make you too silly dear.
All right?" Then what's happened was, I was "Don't be too silly, don't be too silly", 'cause Ellis Peters said.
Don't go over the top, you know.
So she was really nice.
In the fine tradition of detective fiction, Derek Jacobi's Cadfael found he had his helpers.
You realize of course this is strong proof of Philip's guilt.
And his hinderers.
I fear there is one among us who has committed faults of so serious a nature that he no longer has a place here.
I speak of brother Cadfael, father.
And as per Edith's intensions, these subsidiary characters played vital roles within the television series.
To me, in both the books, and I think the films as well, Hugh Beringar is more than the junior sidekick.
He's an equal.
If I find him, or anyone else abroad after curfew without good reason, they'll be arrested.
He was ambitious, with a thirst for knowledge and a thirst for doing the right thing.
And Cadfael had that ability to befriend him, and also steer him towards doing the right thing.
Is this the sort of order you've chosen, hmm? One where any suspect will do, guilty or innocent? What about justice? He was the king's man, as he said time and time again to Cadfael within the series.
I'm the undersheriff of Shropshire, Cadfael, I'll keep the King's peace.
He was helpmate and friend, and of course, Beringar is much younger.
Who comes upon us in arms? Hugh Beringar, undersheriff of this shire, and these are my men.
The swash and the buckle, that was them, I didn't have to swash or buckle.
Hugh obviously wouldn't have solved a crime, ever, had it not been for his friend.
If you were comparing it to a modern-day police show, prior Robert and brother Jerome are the cops who always get it wrong.
Abbott Adolphus is the judge of the stories, and Cadfael is the rather gifted amateur.
And Oswin, I suppose he'd be Hastings to Cadfael's Poirot.
Brother Cadfael, I have an idea.
He's no Lewis, that's for sure.
I tell you this, it couldn't have been thrown from the kitchen windows, you thought it was too far along.
He had such a lovely character, such a sweet soul, such an innocent.
He was always making mistakes.
Cadfael would scold Oswin when he was being incompetent or dropping pots and stuff like that.
I didn't know the pot was cracked.
Oswin that pot was as sound as a bell, one of my best.
Cadfael was always shouting at him, telling him off, but in a paterfamilias kind of way.
I love that relationship.
Brother Cadfael? Steven Smallwood described Jerome as being this slightly creepy sycophanty sidekick of Prior Roberts.
Jerome was a bit of a yes, he was the snake in the grass, the school snitch.
Cadfael tolerated him, perfectly well aware that he couldn't be trusted an inch.
He's basically a rather ineffectual hatchet man.
He's selfish, weak, and very entertainingly stupid.
He should be excommunicated, no indeed he should be struck down! He viewed figures of authority, or people of genuine authority, with a kind of distaste, because he didn't necessarily respect them.
And obviously Cadfael in particular.
Where do your allegiances lie, brother Cadfael, you seem to be more Welsh than Benedictine in these matters.
You needed Rhisiart approval, not his contempt! I will not be thwarted by an upstart lordling.
Prior Robert is played by Michael Culver as a rather querulous, irritable, lofty, you could say snotty sort of monk.
It's obviously better they learn their mistakes now, rather than risk their souls in the hereafter.
It's always fun to play somebody who's a bad-tempered tricky old bastard, and that's what basically prior Robert was.
Is it true, brother, that mistress Bonel was intimately known to you? If I'd just been yet another good monk, it would have been very boring.
It's a role that is very very useful for providing opposition to Cadfael.
This latest outrage will not pass uncorrected.
I think he was very jealous at Cadfael, bitter, rather twisted, solitary.
Had no, didn't seem to have any enjoyment of life, whereas Cadfael was full of life, full of enjoyment.
The abbot, of course, is the boss.
I will hear your complaint against brother Cadfael, and I shall decide whether he is to stay or no.
He had to remember that around him was a threatening world, and he had to keep a discipline within the the Abbey, and Cadfael he trusted enormously.
But he wasn't going to ever show a great warmth towards him.
I think he and Cadfael recognized fellow travelers.
I see your pain, brother Cadfael.
But could you have prevented the child's conception, or the tragedy that followed? I thought it was right to keep a certain, as it were, professional distance.
He trod a very clever path between all the different personalities.
Inhabiting such an extraordinary world of right and wrong gave rise to the highly unusual detecting skills of our cowled crusader.
Cadfael's detecting skills are entirely based upon intelligence, intuition, and apothecary skills.
Who are you, old man, and how did you die? He had this enormous detailed knowledge of flora and fauna.
Creeping Gromwell.
The clues were usually flowers, or a little burnt leaf, or traces of poisons.
Oswin, run to the prior.
Quickly, Oswin! We have one death here already to account for.
Pray heaven we must face no second.
I was forever laying out corpses in the cathedral and picking strange things out of people's navels, and ears, and all sorts of things.
It was a bit like getting back to the Golden Age of detecting really.
It was a steam CSI.
I suppose Cracker uses psychological insights.
Cadfael uses scientific insights, and they're scientific insights of the 12th century.
After the break, adventure and angst in a 12th century Winter's Tale.
Sir Derek Jacobi breathed life into Edith Pargeter's cloistral character brother Cadfael when he first appeared on ITV in 1994.
Over four years, we witnessed 13 medieval murder mysteries, each one providing new challenges for the production team.
"The virgin in the ice" is my favourite episode, I think probably because it was the most difficult.
On a practical basis it's on two levels.
Firstly with the story was incredibly difficult to adapt.
"The virgin in the ice" was Ellis Peters' sixth novel, and would be the story that launched series two of the Cadfael television mysteries.
In order for the narrative to work on screen, the producers had to move away from the author's original work.
The most radical changes that I made to any of them, were with "The virgin in the ice".
And that became much more of an adventure story, really.
Hold me close for warmth.
We must huddle together or perish.
It was an opportunity to really explore that Benedictine community.
And it brought the story home by making Oswin the object of suspicion.
Oh god, oh god, father, forgive me.
I meant no evil, I meant no evil.
We wanted him to be a big part of that story, because it gave Cadfael a personal stake in the outcome.
A fine evening, brother.
Go with god.
He was the victim at the center of the story, he was the the murdered boy who wasn't murdered, you know.
It was great thing to play, because he loses, he loses his memory, can't remember, did he rape the girl, 'cause he certainly was having these sort of like stirrings that were unfamiliar to him, you know, to be, to be in such close proximity to this beautiful young nun, it just completely confused and threw him, and he panicked.
She had no fear to be with me So confiding in my heart And then he gets beaten up, and hurt, and stabbed, and he can't remember any of it, so in his mind, you know, that all that sort of like, Catholic guilt, to make you think I did it, I must have done it, and it's just, his souls is being torn apart by it.
She was found ravished and murdered.
It is forbidden to wish her back, brother, she is with God now.
God forgive me, what have I done? Forgive me, sister.
And it takes his father figure to sort it out for him, you know, it is down to sort it out for him.
Oswin, thoughts are not deeds, and in the space between, lies your innocence.
I am innocent? Oh, beyond all doubt.
I mean as well as it being a nice big part for me in it, it was, it had a, it garnered lot of sympathy for my character which was nice, but it was the look of it, I loved the wintery look.
I remember walking through the snowstorm, and they'd use this massive wind machine, this freezing cold feel, and it used bits of paper for the snow, and it, you know, you try to walk along like that, and you've got sort of to walk through this sort of like polystyrene snowstorm, you know.
Look sister, look, shelter! It just looked like this idyllic English raw winter, and for me I just thought the design of that was an extraordinary achievement, you know, and God it was cold.
The design of "The virgin in the ice" was very complicated, creating a world which was snowed up, and we had to import artificial snow from Cardiff.
We had to build a frozen river, and Cadfael had to cross the river and see the frozen body of the nun encased in the ice.
So what we did was we find a stream in a very deep gully, and we basically built a huge framework over the top of the gully, and that large platform was then covered in canvas and painted a dark green with that sort of broken look that ice has if you imagine underneath the surface.
And then we covered all of that with thick sheets of perspex and on the top we put a scattering of frost and snow.
And that gave us a fairly big stretch of frozen river that Cadfael could lead his horse across.
And we brought the director to see it, and he decided where in the river he wanted Derek to see the frozen body of the nun.
We cut a sort of a big broken shape in the rostrum, and we built a deep box underneath that.
And then we made a latex dummy of the actress, and she was basically laid in this box and the perspex was laid on top.
And it just worked a treat, and then Derek brings the the guys back with pickaxes, and there's one very quick shot where you see the pickaxe is going down into the ice, which was in fact a block of real ice for a big close-up.
And then cut to the body being brought back to the abbey, and for that we had another latex dummy made, and we had made a big mold out of steel, put the latex dummy in it and it filled it with water and we had it refrigerated and frozen into a real block of ice, and then that was put up on trestles and surrounded with candles and there was that very beautiful episode where gradually it melted.
The challenges thrown up by each and every episode never took away from what was achieved: A medieval monk had become a fully credible television detective.
I'm proud of Cadfael because all the time I meet people who enjoy it, and all the time I meet people who are rather thrilled by it.
I remember it as the hardest thing I've ever done, but was good fun as well, and although I didn't think it is a life-changing piece of drama, I think it was a very good piece of entertainment, and it's good to entertain people.
We were all immensely proud of what we did.
I look back on it with such nostalgia, and delight, and love, and regret that we didn't do more.
And in this ending there is a beginning also.
And that is as it should be.
Sadly, Edith Pargeter passed away at the age of 82 in September 1995.
The television series continued until 1998, adapting 13 of her 20 stories.
Although the television option lies open for the remaining 7 stories, Edith left strict instructions as to the literary life of her cherished character.
Edith was adamant that there should never be any Cadfael after she died.
No, when I die, there will be no new books.
Stay with ITV3 as we continue with two more great episodes of Cadfael.
Coming next, Anna Frail stars alongside Derek Jacobi in "A morbid taste of bones".
In 1994 Cadfael was lifted off the page and into our television sets by the incredibly modest hero of stage and screen, sir Derek Jacobi.
His monkish ministerings in a medieval world amidst anarchy and its agonies brought a different dimension to itv, the habitual home of detective drama.
Look at this bruise here.
If he drowned, I would say he was held down less by drink, than by something harsh and heavy pressing on his neck.
It was wonderful to do, a marvelous character to play.
- Is it over? - His penance is complete.
You try to put yourself back into a time when existence was hard, when life was cheap.
Life as a 12th century monk was, I would imagine, a hard one.
I imagine you were hungry a lot of the time, and you were cold a lot of the time, it was only the company of men, you never saw anything of the world, your ideas where the world were very closeted in clothes, and so somebody like Cadfael coming into the midst of that, a man who'd been out and fought, in the Crusades, and to meet someone and hear that person's stories is like a revelation, just unbelievable, you know.
Cadfael had taken up the cowl at the age of 40, with Edith Pargeter discovering him as he was nearing 60.
The year was 1137, and England was in turmoil, as the battles for sovereignty between King Stephen and Empress Maud raged across the land.
Cadfael's years of fighting in the Crusades across the Middle East gave him an understanding that made him a very unusual monk.
He was this contemplative, had been for, I think, sixteen, seventeen years in the monastery, and But he'd been a man of the world, he'd kicked around, he had killed, he had murdered, he had slain.
And that had left its mark on him.
Cadfael's previous life, I think, is an important part of Edith's character, because it made him somebody who understood the world.
He had been in the world, he had fathered a son.
He had knowledge.
I have stood on the field of battle, my armour smoking with the blood of the fallen, and felt nothing.
Such is war's harvest after the first death.
No other reaches your heart.
He had knowledge of humankind, knowledge of the way minds work, knowledge of relationships, which he acquired before he went into the monastry.
When the television series first aired in 1994, Edith had already published 19 Cadfael novels and three short stories.
The character she'd invented was complex and multifaceted, and stamped a strong impression upon her readers.
The books are so evocative, that I think everyone has a very clear image, of what Cadfael is to them, and okay, everyone's image is slightly different, but at the heart of it is this ruggedness, this strength, this feeling that you wouldn't want to meet the man in a fight.
I imagine him as being powerful, fairly handsome but not beautiful, and quiet yet strong in character.
I see him as being a very pleasant open-faced man, but strong, and active, very agile, and I see him as having extremely intelligent lively eyes, very perceptive, and yet able to keep his counsel.
A good poker player, I would've thought.
I'd describe brother Cadfael as first and foremost a man of god.
Everything that he does and thinks is guided by his religious faith.
Cadfael's shrewd a perceptive nature would be central to his role as a detective, but would also throw open the doors to conflict and comradeship amongst the monks that cohabited the world of Edith Pargeter's 12th century monastery.
As far as prior Robert was concerned, he didn't like Cadfael.
I mean, he just found Cadfael a pain in the ass.
You have found no murderer, and half your time is gone.
He saw a herbalist, such people are useful, but they're hardly to be revered above the church.
Prior Robert was sort of a pompous, vain, deluded, person.
He had, you know, he had a capacity to care, but he was quite hoisted on his own vanity.
And I think that's something that Jerome quite liked, they were safe with each other, because they shared similar delusions.
He was my sneak, he was my undercover agent who would find out what was going on when I couldn't be there.
Our valued brother once again visited, and spoke with, the widow.
I think Jerome just saw everybody as objects to to be disciplined.
To cherish this in your bed, is close to fornication.
I think he had so many hang-ups himself, he would get rid of those insecurities by stuff like pointing the finger at other people, and Oswin is the perfect person to be bullied, you know, he's an easy target.
Brother Cadfael told brother Porter that you were headed to the horse fare stables.
Can't remember, brother.
Brother Oswin, idiot, annoying.
He was a boy, he wasn't quite used to how his body worked, he was one of those awkward teenagers, unbearably shy and uncomfortable, socially.
I certainly think that Oswin loved Cadfael as he would love a father, because he couldn't have wished for a better influence.
Imagine if he'd fallen under the auspices of prior Robert and Jeremy, he would have turned in some sort of psychopath.
Ever since brother Oswin first came to our house, he's been as a son to me.
I should never have left him alone with evil.
I must put it right.
And if I order against it? Radulfus respected and trusted Cadfael, but he wanted Cadfael to do as he was told, but always realized that Cadfael made the right choices in the end.
After the break, from the Crusades to the cloisters, the inspiration behind Ellis Peters' cowled character.
Brother Cadfael was brought to life on ITV in September 1994.
Derek Jacobi inhabited the character with an attention to detail and understanding that few others could have brought to the fold.
A rope stretched between two trees of a certain height could fetch a man of his mount.
But there's more than the mark of a rope on his neck, bruises too.
But it had already been almost 20 years since brother Cadfael had first entered the mind of historical novelist Edith Pargeter, who herself was in her 60s when he arrived at the end of her pen.
Edith was coming to these novels, not as something that had just been plucked out of the air, but as a result of a very long career as a writer.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
She was a professional.
And professional writers just get on with the job.
She loved the writing.
Writing really really mattered a lot to her.
And she knew she was good at it.
And she also had this delicious stubbornness too, so that you never felt that you were in the presence of someone who could be in any way veered off of what they wanted to do.
She did what she did and we were the ones who got a word perfect manuscript.
Born in Shropshire in 1913, Edith always knew she would write.
Her first acclaimed full-length novel was published just before the war in 1939, and would be the first of more than 70 books in her lifetime, combining styles between historical novels and contemporary mysteries, she perfected her art.
We'd published her "Brothers of Gwynedd", a huge historical quartet, which in a way was similar to her first great historical work, the "Heaven tree" trilogy, which was published back in the 60s.
It was set in the 12th-13th century, and they were a mixture of very very well researched history of that period, and of the civil wars that raged across the border, but they were also romances.
And she had, she did have a very soft heart for a good romance, and I always have had the feeling that Cadfael came out of those books.
She always used to say that he found her, she didn't find him.
The man you accuse is absolutely clear of this, even if it were murder, he's here in sanctuary.
Be ashamed to make such senseless charges.
The idea of a sleuthing monk seemed to bring together the two aspects that she'd been writing up to that point.
We used to publish an annual anthology called "Winter's Crimes" and we used to commission short stories.
And Edith had submitted an historical short story.
Not medieval, interesting, it was Roman.
But when she sent this in and I was talking to her about it, I said, Have you ever thought of writing an historical mystery? And she said, Yes, I've been thinking about it.
And about six months later, "A morbid taste for bones" arrived.
And I though it wonderful.
I've owned Owen and Blakeway, that is the "History of Shrewsbury" in two volumes, one secular, and one the church history, since I was fifteen, and I know it pretty well.
But just in dipping into it again, I got to the part where the prior of Shrewsbury Abbey takes a party of monks into Wales, to find the relics of Saint Winifred, and bring them back to enhance the status of Shrewsbury Abbey.
And it struck me that it would make a wonderful plot for a thriller, because they could get rid of a corpse which really had to disappear totally by putting it in the reliquary meant for the Saint, bringing him back to sit on an altar, I'm afraid, in Shrewsbury.
So it was always really out of Shrewsbury's genuine history.
I think she knew pretty early on that she had stumbled onto a very very special person.
I wanted him to have a very wide and deep understanding of human nature, to have been through quite a number of minor sins that inirate himself, so that he can understand sinners, and not to have the narrow cloistral view of humanity, which a child brought up as a monk, or an apprentice from five years old might very well take a different view from him.
He has to have compassion.
Whatever she did, came from something within her, which might have been best if it had not been maimed.
She was much wronged.
It's a complicated thing for me to talk about Cadfael, because I see so much of Edith in this character.
She just portrayed a very human person with weaknesses and doubts, and huge strengths, and of course the wisdom.
And for me Edith exuded wisdom that came from real life.
Edith believed that real wisdom comes from getting in there and living it, and Cadfael had lived it.
I think I have the better of you, brother.
And I think we should both have died.
I think the fact that Cadfael has a past, and we return to it and gradually learn about it through the books, is one of the ways that Edith gave depth to the series.
They would be very formulaic if you every time had somebody died and Cadfael does the investigation and solves it and that's all there is.
But the richness that we get through him being an unusual monk, in that he has been a soldier in the past, helps him to be a good detective of course, but it's also, it's part of the narrative.
Having created, or tried to create, to project myself into, a Benedictine monk, a genuine one, with a real vocation, then I have to try and fit my mind into his, and speak through him.
But also I can't put anything into him that I don't feel myself.
So you may draw conclusions about how I feel about justice, about compassion, about religion too.
I share my thoughts with god alone.
Published in 1977, "A morbid taste for bones" had been written as a one-off murder mystery, set against a backdrop of war in medieval England and Wales.
But the fascinating combination of a sleuthing monk and the anarchic setting, was just too tempting for Edith, writing as Ellis Peters, to resist.
I never intended it at the beginning to be a series.
It was strictly a one-off, "A morbid taste for bones".
And then I kept thinking, well, the very year after that, was the siege of Shrewsbury, when the entire garrison were hanged by King Stephen after he took the castle.
And there must be a plot somewhere there, and that was the beginning of course of "One corpse too many".
And by the time that one was finished I found I developed the appetite to go on with it.
That second novel was the inspiration that Edith needed to continue her writing.
Occasionally you see an historical novel where the author has obviously got the plot, and he's got the period, and sort of dumps the two together more or less.
But the wonderful thing about the Cadfaels is that everything hinges on everything else.
If you take away the murder method, you haven't got a story.
If you take away the setting, the murder method won't work.
If you take away the identity of the murder, then nothing works.
And that really appeals to me, that's first-class writing.
What comes through for me is her political side.
She was, especially in her youth, extraordinarily left-wing.
I think she's seen as a kind of cozy lady in a cardigan writing about people in tights.
But that is not Edith at all.
She was passionate, and that comes through in the books, in Cadfael particularly.
His morality, the times when he struggles against authority, which he does, throughout the series.
All I'm saying is, I think it's a pity, and I'll put it no stronger than that.
But I think it's a pity you let all the pilgrims just walk out of the room.
I should have kept them locked up here, where they have no right to be in the first place? Given there might have been a murderer among them it could have been a good idea.
As Edith approached her 70th year, the Cadfael novels kept on coming.
She produced two books a year in the early 1980s, but despite critical acclaim was finding it difficult to break into the big-time.
For the most really weird thing is we could not sell the rights to the paperback.
We were not quite giving them away, but we were getting to that point.
And so Futura bought them, and I think I'm right in saying they bought the first seven titles for five hundred pounds each.
I wanted to publish Ellis Peters, and I couldn't quite think how to publish her successfully in paperback, because I thought that the medieval background was actually a disadvantage, that people mostly wanted contemporary mysteries.
And then "The name of the rose" was published, and then became a great success in film with Sean Connery as the lead character.
And I suddenly realized that the medieval element was actually a selling point, and not a negative.
And we published them with medieval style covers.
And they were a success immediately and started selling in very large numbers, and for the first time, the age of about 65, Ellis Peters hit the bestseller list.
By the mid 1980s, Ellis Peters' Cadfael had struck a chord at the heart of the readership, and when something's that popular, there's always someone wanting to make more of the character.
"Monk's hood" by Ellis Peters, dramatized for radio by Bert Coules.
The things that appealed to me as being suitable for radio were really the things that makes the books so incredibly popular.
The character of Cadfael himself obviously, a wonderful, well-rounded, interesting character, the world, the glimpse into a world that not many people know about, and perhaps of more than all of those, the atmosphere.
The radio is very good at suggesting atmosphere with fairly minimal means.
Brother Cadfael, herbalist and garden keeper of the Benedictine abbey of St.
Peter and St.
Paul in Shrewsbury, came to chapter in tranquility.
- Good morning, brother Cadfael.
- Good morning.
Philip Madoc is, was, and still is, indeed, the perfect casting.
He's Welsh, he's rugged, he's totally believable, as a man who's done all these things as a crusader, you can see Philip in armour fighting for the cross, you can see him at sea standing in the prow of his boat, and you could also see him pottering about his herb garden, come to contentment, as the phrase is.
What troubles you, Cadfael? Father abbot, I was thinking that even God can't make peaceful creatures out of men without some support from his raw material.
Two things combined make it a unique part.
You have the chance of playing a man who already is mature.
I was coming into a new kind of experience.
And the story, which is a whodunit, but it's a whodunit in a special period.
On top of that of course, the man is a Welshman, and I think that what appealed to me was the fact that he was obviously very different.
In a way he was a kind of renegade, but not just because he had been a soldier, all those lives in turn to the holy church, but because he was a Welshman from over the border of Shrewsbury.
The Welsh elements of the novels were hugely important to Edith, but it would be the characters she created that sparked interest from central TV in the early 1990s.
Director of programs at Central Television had told the head of drama, Ted Giles, that his wife was a great fan.
So I got hold of all the books, and I was very engaged by the characters in it.
And I said I thought there was a series in it, and that we should see whether we could do it for ITV.
I remember we made a trip up to Iron Bridge, where Edith lived then, she was interested and, you know, asked some pertinent questions, and we talked about it all over lunch, and I think she sort of did say reluctantly, but, you know, kind of sort of mature and reasoned approach, and anyway the upshot of it was that we decided to go forward.
She never once said to me, I'm not sure I want this.
I think she was very curious and thought it would be a lovely thing to see.
I am very excited about it, I hope it will take place quickly, so that I can really see what can be made of it on screen.
It is a very good prospect, because, provided we get the right man, I think it could be very good.
With Edith's permission to proceed, there were still doubts from within the ITV as to the appeal of a medieval detective.
People who live in medieval times, ruled by fear of the devil and love of God, all the sort of things that contemporary audiences don't have a great deal of sympathy with.
And the stories very much rely upon that.
On the other hand they also have completely contemporary elements of detective fiction and romantic fiction melded together in Edith Pargeter's stories.
And those are what ITV and we thought would be able to make them accessible to the contemporary television audience.
- This is hemlock.
- It is indeed.
I don't need it, and you shouldn't be so free in selling it.
I only sell such wares to those who are careful.
Careful? Your wares can kill! Once the first script was written, my task was to find out how on earth we could make it for the money that's available to make an ITV series.
I worked out that the only way we could afford to do it was to build the world out of wooden plaster, because in Britain basically most of the elements that we require for the stories are in ruins.
We needed them as they were freshly built in the 12th century.
The two places that we could possibly afford were Poland and Hungary.
I chose Hungary for various practical reasons, and we built all the world on the back lot and on the stages of a very crumbling studio in Budapest.
In the belief that the Cadfael project could succeed, it was important to find the perfect player for the part.
The nature of the story was that you needed a very compelling and able actor to play the part of brother Cadfael because he was the central figure in the piece.
It's been a secret up till now, but I suppose I can say that our first choice originally for Cadfael was Ian Holmes.
And Ian Holmes accepted the role, but ITV took so much time to make up its mind to do it, that he got bored of waiting and went away.
We then thought long and hard about who to replace him with, and were delighted to be able to entice Derek to the role.
They said we'd like you to meet Edith Pargeter in order to get her approval of you.
And Edith definitely wanted to meet him, and I think he definitely wanted to meet her, because he understood that Edith and Cadfael were joined at the hip.
She kind of looked me up and down, and was very appraising all through lunch, and she didn't give anything away, she played cards very close to her chest, and it was at the end of lunch, she said, I think you'll be a lovely Cadfael.
I think Edith really really was pleased with the choice of Cadfael.
And that is as it should be.
She wrote to me, I shall be going to Budapest late in September, just to see a couple of days filming.
I'm delighted to have Derek Jacobi.
I met him a few weeks ago, and we got on well.
I think he would be very good.
After the break, herbs and hangings in Hungary, brother Cadfael springs to life.
In September 1994, sir Derek Jacobi gave life to Edith Pargeters' brother Cadfael in the form of a sleuthing monk, living in the dark and dangerous world of medieval England.
He clawed at the cord that was killing him.
His hands were free.
Did you hang any whose hands were not tied? He was such a multi-layered character, he was this man of action, this man of the world, and then this celibate, contemplative man.
That combination was fascinating to try to act.
In bringing the author's creation to the screen, it was important to remain true to the essence of her literary characters.
Edith was keen for them to be adapted, but she was keen for them to be adapted faithfully.
To go from book to dramatization requires a writer who gets the essence of the book, and the essence of the story, and turns it into a completely different medium.
Well, I'd read them as a fan, you know, years earlier.
The very first one I read was "One corpse too many".
And so it was a lovely surprise to be asked to be involved in it.
In the first series, there were to be four of Edith's novels adapted for the screen.
Each had its own peculiarities, and Russell Lewis was careful to ensure that the author would not be upset by his interpretations of her work.
I think I've always tried to be faithful to her intent.
I felt as long as I was doing that, I was alright.
Nine times out of the ten changes were made were purely driven by the necessity of production.
We only had a certain amount of minutes that we could tell the story in.
And a certain amount of characters that we could find screen time for.
So some subplots would occasionally go.
With the scripts ongoing, ensuring authenticity to the era in which this medieval monk was ministering his mysteries would also be a challenge.
Because of the period of Cadfael, very little, if anything, exists from that period, and certainly in Hungary, there was nothing that was appropriate to England in the 12th century.
Every single thing that you see in the background of the actors there was all had to be thought about, costed, drawn, and built.
I remember going to the set for the first time and it just taking my breath away.
We were astonished to see this abbey.
It was extraordinary.
It looked beautiful.
It was proper You thought it was real.
Although it was quite a new looking abbey, as it would've been because it was a relative new abby, you know, You went into it and you really did think you were entering the house of god.
It had an extraordinary atmosphere.
And it was lovely to work in there, because you really felt I mean it was just like being in here.
There's really no difference.
And then you were knocked on the pillar, and it was polystyrene there.
Walking into those rooms, I immediately kind of began to create a sense of the world in which this character was living.
Whatever the effect, brother Jerome, your intention was murder.
And your soul stands in peril.
Return to your cell.
You'll leave it only for your punishment.
It was so authentic that of course you felt your job was done for you in a way, all you had to do was learn the lines, put the costume on, and say a few words, and people would believe it.
And brother shall deliver brother to death.
This has meaning for someone here.
Director Graham Theakston was responsible for ensuring that the overall feel of the series was true to the era.
I kind of took on board the fact that probably the dialogue was historically correct for the kind of genre we were playing with, and also that the sets were historically correct too, I kind of believed the designer knew enough to be authentic in that sense.
So I guess what I was looking for was to make these things emotional, and to use the time, and the period, and the sets, and the landscape, and the costumes, and things like that, to try and make people engage with the story.
- Don't! - No! The look of Cadfael is determined.
by the light sources that were pervading at the time.
A medieval world is a very dark world.
It's either day light or no light at all.
The scripts also work pretty dark, I mean they did involve murders in pretty sort of basic circumstances, so what I wanted was not to do a chocolate box version of the 12th century.
King Stephen's siege of Shrewsbury Abbey in August 1138 is the fact around which Edith Pargeter based her second novel, "One corpse to many".
And the story provided a highly dramatic opener for the series.
I am charged by his grace king Stephen to demand your immediate surrender.
Let the bastard rant all he will.
We do not kneel before thieves and usurpers.
But the success of the series would hinge on what sir Derek Jacobi could bring to the viewers with his interpretation of Edith's character.
Sir Derek Jacobi is an extremely fine actor, that's an obvious thing to say, but he brings so many layers to his performances.
I know a decent man is dead.
I know a young girl nearly drowned.
I know death is following those relics, and I beg you, father, before someone else dies, decide who is to have them.
He has that wonderful ability to be there and suggest so many things that are a background in his character's life.
I was in the world forty years before I took this discipline for my cue.
I've been soldier, sailor, and sinner.
You got the Cadfael, the man that he is now, in the Abbey, but you can feel underneath, all that what he's been through, and the appalling sights he must have seen.
But what he brings with him too is a gentleness, that just sort of pours out of him.
There's a sort of goodness.
He's a gentle man.
No man is measured by the love he gives to others, but by how much he is loved.
He's so physically eloquent, you know, he doesn't have to do much to tell you a story about what the code says to play the subtext, and that's why he is so great.
Enough! Derek is fantastic in the role, I mean the role, as the name suggests, is actually Welsh.
Derek by no stretch of the imagination is Welsh, didn't try to pretend to be Welsh, but what he did do is latch on to the burning sense of integrity and the need for justice and the need for searching out what was right, which is what I think Edith liked about the way that he portrays the role.
I approve and endorsed the law of Wales, which says that a son born out of wedlock may inherit.
But not a son who has murdered his father.
Although she was in her early 80s, Edith Pargeter made a trip out to Hungary to witness firsthand how her creation was taking shape on film.
She loved watching the actors speaking some of her words.
She seemed very happy, and she was particularly happy by Derek Jacobi's representation of her character.
I think she thought he was brother Cadfael.
She really enjoyed it.
She loved being there.
I don't think she quite could quite believe what was going on, you know.
She wrote to me when she got back, "The break in Budapest was wonderful.
Very enlightening about how the film world proceeds in ordered chaos.
I found it unexpectedly attractive.
I loved every minute, and feel very hopeful about the results.
Derek will be splendid.
His own niceness comes through, and I very much like some of the young people.
Unknown names, but invariably nice folk.
" I did meet Edith once and it was wonderful because she was lovely and eccentric and exactly how I wanted her to be.
She was great, she was really nice, and she was talking about Oswin, and she went, "Don't let them make you too silly dear.
All right?" Then what's happened was, I was "Don't be too silly, don't be too silly", 'cause Ellis Peters said.
Don't go over the top, you know.
So she was really nice.
In the fine tradition of detective fiction, Derek Jacobi's Cadfael found he had his helpers.
You realize of course this is strong proof of Philip's guilt.
And his hinderers.
I fear there is one among us who has committed faults of so serious a nature that he no longer has a place here.
I speak of brother Cadfael, father.
And as per Edith's intensions, these subsidiary characters played vital roles within the television series.
To me, in both the books, and I think the films as well, Hugh Beringar is more than the junior sidekick.
He's an equal.
If I find him, or anyone else abroad after curfew without good reason, they'll be arrested.
He was ambitious, with a thirst for knowledge and a thirst for doing the right thing.
And Cadfael had that ability to befriend him, and also steer him towards doing the right thing.
Is this the sort of order you've chosen, hmm? One where any suspect will do, guilty or innocent? What about justice? He was the king's man, as he said time and time again to Cadfael within the series.
I'm the undersheriff of Shropshire, Cadfael, I'll keep the King's peace.
He was helpmate and friend, and of course, Beringar is much younger.
Who comes upon us in arms? Hugh Beringar, undersheriff of this shire, and these are my men.
The swash and the buckle, that was them, I didn't have to swash or buckle.
Hugh obviously wouldn't have solved a crime, ever, had it not been for his friend.
If you were comparing it to a modern-day police show, prior Robert and brother Jerome are the cops who always get it wrong.
Abbott Adolphus is the judge of the stories, and Cadfael is the rather gifted amateur.
And Oswin, I suppose he'd be Hastings to Cadfael's Poirot.
Brother Cadfael, I have an idea.
He's no Lewis, that's for sure.
I tell you this, it couldn't have been thrown from the kitchen windows, you thought it was too far along.
He had such a lovely character, such a sweet soul, such an innocent.
He was always making mistakes.
Cadfael would scold Oswin when he was being incompetent or dropping pots and stuff like that.
I didn't know the pot was cracked.
Oswin that pot was as sound as a bell, one of my best.
Cadfael was always shouting at him, telling him off, but in a paterfamilias kind of way.
I love that relationship.
Brother Cadfael? Steven Smallwood described Jerome as being this slightly creepy sycophanty sidekick of Prior Roberts.
Jerome was a bit of a yes, he was the snake in the grass, the school snitch.
Cadfael tolerated him, perfectly well aware that he couldn't be trusted an inch.
He's basically a rather ineffectual hatchet man.
He's selfish, weak, and very entertainingly stupid.
He should be excommunicated, no indeed he should be struck down! He viewed figures of authority, or people of genuine authority, with a kind of distaste, because he didn't necessarily respect them.
And obviously Cadfael in particular.
Where do your allegiances lie, brother Cadfael, you seem to be more Welsh than Benedictine in these matters.
You needed Rhisiart approval, not his contempt! I will not be thwarted by an upstart lordling.
Prior Robert is played by Michael Culver as a rather querulous, irritable, lofty, you could say snotty sort of monk.
It's obviously better they learn their mistakes now, rather than risk their souls in the hereafter.
It's always fun to play somebody who's a bad-tempered tricky old bastard, and that's what basically prior Robert was.
Is it true, brother, that mistress Bonel was intimately known to you? If I'd just been yet another good monk, it would have been very boring.
It's a role that is very very useful for providing opposition to Cadfael.
This latest outrage will not pass uncorrected.
I think he was very jealous at Cadfael, bitter, rather twisted, solitary.
Had no, didn't seem to have any enjoyment of life, whereas Cadfael was full of life, full of enjoyment.
The abbot, of course, is the boss.
I will hear your complaint against brother Cadfael, and I shall decide whether he is to stay or no.
He had to remember that around him was a threatening world, and he had to keep a discipline within the the Abbey, and Cadfael he trusted enormously.
But he wasn't going to ever show a great warmth towards him.
I think he and Cadfael recognized fellow travelers.
I see your pain, brother Cadfael.
But could you have prevented the child's conception, or the tragedy that followed? I thought it was right to keep a certain, as it were, professional distance.
He trod a very clever path between all the different personalities.
Inhabiting such an extraordinary world of right and wrong gave rise to the highly unusual detecting skills of our cowled crusader.
Cadfael's detecting skills are entirely based upon intelligence, intuition, and apothecary skills.
Who are you, old man, and how did you die? He had this enormous detailed knowledge of flora and fauna.
Creeping Gromwell.
The clues were usually flowers, or a little burnt leaf, or traces of poisons.
Oswin, run to the prior.
Quickly, Oswin! We have one death here already to account for.
Pray heaven we must face no second.
I was forever laying out corpses in the cathedral and picking strange things out of people's navels, and ears, and all sorts of things.
It was a bit like getting back to the Golden Age of detecting really.
It was a steam CSI.
I suppose Cracker uses psychological insights.
Cadfael uses scientific insights, and they're scientific insights of the 12th century.
After the break, adventure and angst in a 12th century Winter's Tale.
Sir Derek Jacobi breathed life into Edith Pargeter's cloistral character brother Cadfael when he first appeared on ITV in 1994.
Over four years, we witnessed 13 medieval murder mysteries, each one providing new challenges for the production team.
"The virgin in the ice" is my favourite episode, I think probably because it was the most difficult.
On a practical basis it's on two levels.
Firstly with the story was incredibly difficult to adapt.
"The virgin in the ice" was Ellis Peters' sixth novel, and would be the story that launched series two of the Cadfael television mysteries.
In order for the narrative to work on screen, the producers had to move away from the author's original work.
The most radical changes that I made to any of them, were with "The virgin in the ice".
And that became much more of an adventure story, really.
Hold me close for warmth.
We must huddle together or perish.
It was an opportunity to really explore that Benedictine community.
And it brought the story home by making Oswin the object of suspicion.
Oh god, oh god, father, forgive me.
I meant no evil, I meant no evil.
We wanted him to be a big part of that story, because it gave Cadfael a personal stake in the outcome.
A fine evening, brother.
Go with god.
He was the victim at the center of the story, he was the the murdered boy who wasn't murdered, you know.
It was great thing to play, because he loses, he loses his memory, can't remember, did he rape the girl, 'cause he certainly was having these sort of like stirrings that were unfamiliar to him, you know, to be, to be in such close proximity to this beautiful young nun, it just completely confused and threw him, and he panicked.
She had no fear to be with me So confiding in my heart And then he gets beaten up, and hurt, and stabbed, and he can't remember any of it, so in his mind, you know, that all that sort of like, Catholic guilt, to make you think I did it, I must have done it, and it's just, his souls is being torn apart by it.
She was found ravished and murdered.
It is forbidden to wish her back, brother, she is with God now.
God forgive me, what have I done? Forgive me, sister.
And it takes his father figure to sort it out for him, you know, it is down to sort it out for him.
Oswin, thoughts are not deeds, and in the space between, lies your innocence.
I am innocent? Oh, beyond all doubt.
I mean as well as it being a nice big part for me in it, it was, it had a, it garnered lot of sympathy for my character which was nice, but it was the look of it, I loved the wintery look.
I remember walking through the snowstorm, and they'd use this massive wind machine, this freezing cold feel, and it used bits of paper for the snow, and it, you know, you try to walk along like that, and you've got sort of to walk through this sort of like polystyrene snowstorm, you know.
Look sister, look, shelter! It just looked like this idyllic English raw winter, and for me I just thought the design of that was an extraordinary achievement, you know, and God it was cold.
The design of "The virgin in the ice" was very complicated, creating a world which was snowed up, and we had to import artificial snow from Cardiff.
We had to build a frozen river, and Cadfael had to cross the river and see the frozen body of the nun encased in the ice.
So what we did was we find a stream in a very deep gully, and we basically built a huge framework over the top of the gully, and that large platform was then covered in canvas and painted a dark green with that sort of broken look that ice has if you imagine underneath the surface.
And then we covered all of that with thick sheets of perspex and on the top we put a scattering of frost and snow.
And that gave us a fairly big stretch of frozen river that Cadfael could lead his horse across.
And we brought the director to see it, and he decided where in the river he wanted Derek to see the frozen body of the nun.
We cut a sort of a big broken shape in the rostrum, and we built a deep box underneath that.
And then we made a latex dummy of the actress, and she was basically laid in this box and the perspex was laid on top.
And it just worked a treat, and then Derek brings the the guys back with pickaxes, and there's one very quick shot where you see the pickaxe is going down into the ice, which was in fact a block of real ice for a big close-up.
And then cut to the body being brought back to the abbey, and for that we had another latex dummy made, and we had made a big mold out of steel, put the latex dummy in it and it filled it with water and we had it refrigerated and frozen into a real block of ice, and then that was put up on trestles and surrounded with candles and there was that very beautiful episode where gradually it melted.
The challenges thrown up by each and every episode never took away from what was achieved: A medieval monk had become a fully credible television detective.
I'm proud of Cadfael because all the time I meet people who enjoy it, and all the time I meet people who are rather thrilled by it.
I remember it as the hardest thing I've ever done, but was good fun as well, and although I didn't think it is a life-changing piece of drama, I think it was a very good piece of entertainment, and it's good to entertain people.
We were all immensely proud of what we did.
I look back on it with such nostalgia, and delight, and love, and regret that we didn't do more.
And in this ending there is a beginning also.
And that is as it should be.
Sadly, Edith Pargeter passed away at the age of 82 in September 1995.
The television series continued until 1998, adapting 13 of her 20 stories.
Although the television option lies open for the remaining 7 stories, Edith left strict instructions as to the literary life of her cherished character.
Edith was adamant that there should never be any Cadfael after she died.
No, when I die, there will be no new books.
Stay with ITV3 as we continue with two more great episodes of Cadfael.
Coming next, Anna Frail stars alongside Derek Jacobi in "A morbid taste of bones".