The year is 1142. England is in the iron grip of civil war. And within the sheltered cloisters of the Benedictine Abbey, there begins a chain of events no less momentous than the upheavals of the outside world. First, there is the sad demise of the Lord of Eaton, whose ten-year-old son and heir, the young Richard, is a pupil at the Abbey. The boy refuses to surrender his new powers to his formidable grandmother, Dionysia. Then there is the arrival...