Cadfael: One Corpse Too Many

The Set-up: The year is 1138. King Stephen is at odds with the Empress Maude. Many of the gentry fully support Stephen, but some support Maude who sits far off in France.
Thus is the background set for this, the first episode of the Cadfael Chronicles, a BBC produced series based on the popular Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters. She has written 20 Cadfael novels and 3 short stories to date. This episode, while the first of the series is based on the second novel. Now, I haven't read the novels, but this seemed a good place to start - laying out the political background for a story of intrigue that drop a certain Benedictine Monk into the case of a murder and a wrongly accused man.
Cadfael, played brilliantly by Sir Derek Jacobi, is an uncommon monk, having come to the order after many years as a soldier who fought in the crusades. Cadfael's main concerns are his herb garden and helping the sick in the nearby area to the Abbey. It is at the Abbey where a woman brings her young charge to join the monks while the fighting between Stephen's and Maude's men is going on. It is discovered in no time that the young "man" is really a teen-aged girl, who is fleeing capture by Stephen's men because they want to hold her as ransom to get what they want by her nobleman uncle who has sworn allegiance to Maude. None will recognize her, save for the man that she is betrothed to, against her will of course, a man by the name of Hugh Beringar (Sean Pertwee).

The Rest: All of the series regulars are introduced in this episode, Brother Jerome (Julian Firth) and Prior Robert (Michael Culver) who are out to thwart Cadfael, not as he attempts to solve crimes but to show that he should not be a monk. Hugh Beringar, who at first is made to look a cad until at the end all is resolved that he's actually quite shrewd and a good man, and is in fact made the Deputy Sheriff by none less than the King Stephen (Michael Grandage) himself. There is Brother Oswin (Mark Charnock), the likable and very clumsy young assistant to Cadfael.
Through what seems an unusual amount of access to the King, Cadfael is able to convince his superiors at the Abbey to allow him to stick to solving the case. Cadfael finds himself working with Beringar, while thinking that Beringar might have been the one to commit the murder. Nearly getting himself killed, Beringar is able to prove that he is innocent of the crime, and even let's the girl escape to Maude's lands at the end of the story.

Commentary: Is it kad-fell? Kad-feel? Kad-file? They can't quite make up their minds, but he always refers to himself as kad-file, and you would think that he would know. Actually, according to Ellis Peters, they're all wrong. It's a Welsh name and should be pronounce kad-vile. So there.
The action was pretty good, but the sword fighting was lame, especially for a BBC production. They may like to keep the costs down, but they employ well-trained stage actors (who in Britain has acted on television but not on stage?), whom I expect better sword fighting from.
In this pre-CSI world - both in the fact the story takes place some 875 years ago, and that it's first episdoe pre-dates the first episode of CSI by about six years, there are an awful lot of CSI-type devices, such as trace evidence that definitively ties the murderer to the murder. Cool.

The Proof: lack of bruising on the dead mans wrists.