Kendrick Wroe is found dead in the frozen Shill Brook, and the immediate assumption is that he was poaching Lord Gilbert’s fish. Sir Hugh de Singleton finds reasons to doubt that simple explanation. When one of Kendrick’s friends is killed and another is forced to seek safety at Eynsham Abbey, the pattern begins to look deliberate. The danger becomes personal when Hugh’s daughter Bessie is abducted, while another unexplained death among a plough team adds to the pressure on him to identify the connection between the victims.
The seventeenth Chronicle returns fully to the Oxfordshire countryside after the political and fiscal changes surrounding 1377. Frozen waterways, agricultural work, abbey sanctuary and lordly rights over fish and game all shape what the characters can do and what behaviour neighbours consider suspicious. Hugh’s position as surgeon, knight and bailiff no longer protects his family from the consequences of an investigation, making this case unusually intimate while retaining the series’ concern with evidence, local obligation and moral responsibility in late medieval England.
