Cadfael

Brother Cadfael is the main fictional character in a series of historical murder mysteries written between 1977 and 1994 by the linguistscholar Edith Pargeter under the name Ellis Peters. The character of Cadfael himself is a Welsh Benedictine monk living at the Abbey of St Peter and St Paul, in Shrewsbury, western England, in the first half of the 12th century. The historically accurate stories are set between about 1135 and about 1145, during The Anarchy, the destructive contest for the crown of England between King Stephen and Empress Maud.

He was born in May 1080 into a villein community in Trefriw, Conwy, in North Wales, and had at least one sibling, a younger brother. Rather than wait to inherit the right to till a section of land, he left his home at the age of fourteen as servant to a wooltrader, and thus became acquainted with Shrewsbury early in life. In 1096, he embarked on the First Crusade to the Holy Land in the force commanded by Robert II, Duke of Normandy. After the victorious end to the Crusade, he lived for several years in Syria and the Holy Land, earning a living as a sailor, before returning to England around 1114 to find that Richildis Vaughan, to whom he had been unofficially engaged, had tired of waiting and had married Eward Gurney, a Shrewsbury craftsman. Cadfael became a manatarms in the war waged by Henry I of England to secure the union with Normandy, and returned again to England in the service of a nobleman, Roger Mauduit, who kidnapped Prior Heribert of Shrewsbury Abbey in an attempt to foil

Source: Wikipedia