All Jean wants is a peaceful life as a monk, but everything his adoptive father Wimer built is under threat, as the much larger Holy Trinity church tries to swallow Dodnash Priory whole. Jean must find a way to fight them off amidst all the chaos of King John's reign...or break the promise he made on his father's grave.

The Priest's Son continues the tale of Dodnash Priory, reeling from King John's punitive taxes and an England-wide excommunication. Jean, Wimer's adopted son, wants nothing more than to become a postulant and live in peace, but he must fight off the powers that want to split up the Priory and take its lands. Finally the Pope intervenes, but at a cost.

I live about a quarter of a mile away from where Dodnash Priory is marked on the map. It's at the bottom of a steep valley, and is flooded with the first autumn storm, and stays that way all winter. It's the last place you'd want to build a church and a community! Sheriff and Priest tells the story of how Wimer the Chaplain founded the Priory in a much more suitable place.

Working as an amateur archaeologist, I stumbled over that site, and later confirmed it with research in the Suffolk Record Office: there's no doubt that the Priory moved over to the flooded meadow sometime in the early 13th century, and it's long intrigued me as to why. The Priest's Son is the culmination of another three years' research: the events are real and documented, as are the major players. Jean and Edeva are fictional, because events alone do not make a story :)

If you enjoyed Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth series and its focus on ordinary people, give this a go.