In October of 1142, a local landlord makes a present of the Potter's Field to the local clergy. This substantial meadow, previously owned by a potter called Ruald and his lovely young wife, is transferred to the Benedictine Abby of St. Peter and St. Paul in August of 1143. Shortly afterward the Benedictine monks begin to plow it.

The plow turns up the long raven tresses of a young woman, dead a year or more; even Brother Cadfael, herbalist and student of medicine, cannot say how long.

The body brings with it complex and delicate problems, for Ruald had abandoned his beautiful wife Generys to take monastic vows, and she was believed to have gone away secretly with a new lover. It seems likely that the dead woman is Generys, and that someone has murdered her. With the arrival at the Abbey of young Sulien Blount, a novice fleeing homeward from an abby ravaged by the civil war raging in East Anglia, the mysteries surrounding the corpse start to muliply.

In the Seventeenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael the medieval scholarship is everywhere present, but it is the plot that dominates--an intricate mystery with a most sensational and unexpected outcome.