Silences And Sounds: margins

Sunday, January 25, 2026

Cadfael’s Lepers on World Leprosy Day

The leper house sits at the edge of the village – more accurately, beyond it. It’s a ramshackle structure, visibly outside the rhythms of ordinary life. The camera makes sure we understand this geography before we understand anything else: illness is spatialized. Care happens “elsewhere,” out of bounds for regular village life. (It’s like the Sondersiechen, the medieval leper home in Bregenz – away from town, in a field, in a location that distances illness in thought, space, and structure.)

In this episode of Cadfael (Season 1 ep. 3), we start our story by following one of the lepers as he approaches. The leper carries a cowbell mounted on a pole, its ground-thumps clanging in keeping with his stride. He regularly and perhaps automatically shakes his other hand to sound a wooden clacker, a percussion instrument not to entertain but to announce his presence. Sound arrives before the body. Warning precedes encounter. As he passes by, we see his wrapped arm – a stump? – across a colleague’s shoulder; his weakened body needs support. And he has entered the yard of a place where such care happens.

Another leper emerges from the house, his face fully covered by a cloth mask pierced only for the eyes, his clothing ragged but carefully concealing all exposed skin. Lepers should not be seen. When we do see something of the disease itself, it is his hand: deformed, with nodules, and missing two and a half fingers. Damage is real, irreversible, unromantic. Lazarus has been profoundly altered by his illness.

Bran, by contrast, is younger. His body has responded to the lotions Cadfael supplies. The monks, Cadfael and Brother Mark, speculate cautiously about whether he might someday return to the world. “There’s always hope,” Cadfael says; “By God's grace and man's efforts we may yet send him back whole into the world.” It’s a small line, but it matters. Miraculous recovery is plausible; medical care is feasible. We do not have to sit by and do nothing.

Medicine opens a door. Society decides whether it stays open. Donors, we soon realize, could make a difference.

The first potential donor is a man on horseback, well-armed, well-accompanied. When the request comes – “coin for a leper, my lord?” – his response is immediate, and violent. He raises his cudgel and snaps, “Out of my way, vermin. Take thy contagion out of my sight.” He follows this with his chosen epithet, “Filthy lepers.” They are not individuals; they are a polluted class, to his mind unworthy. And yet his three followers each toss a few coins as they pass. Fear does not erase obligation entirely, and the open prejudice looks shameful in the face of the generosity of his juniors. We should judge a man by his actions; he has failed a basic test of empathy.

The second donor is a lady on horseback, her aunt riding behind in a carriage. “A little something, my lady?” She willingly tosses her coins, and a generous assortment at that. Her aunt immediately objects: “You should not waste your coins on lepers.” The one thinks charity necessary; the other deems it imprudent expenditure. Are lepers worthy poor? Medieval opinion appears divided.

Stigma and care are not opposites here; they operate simultaneously, in plain view. The lepers are marked and masked, sonically announced, verbally dehumanized. They are feared as contagious, morally suspect, and socially dangerous. And yet they are housed, supplied with medicines, provisioned with care. They are expected to beg, their abjection an expectation or even a requirement of their existence. Yet they also receive alms – not every time, but more often than not in this clip. There is a system here, however inadequate or dehumanizing it may feel to modern viewers.

And that’s where this episode’s careful realism matters. Medieval society did not simply abandon people with terrifying illnesses, though it assuredly did not embrace them. Instead, it built an uneasy safety net at the margins: regulated begging, institutional housing, religious oversight, and just enough compassion to keep people alive without restoring them fully to community life. It is an existence on the fringe, a place of managed exclusion. But care also happens – sores are treated, hope articulated, and coins, however reluctantly given, still change hands.

On World Leprosy Day, that tension feels worth sitting with. Not just the cruelty, but also the infrastructure. Not just the fear, but the effort – partial, flawed, deeply hierarchical – to respond to suffering rather than erase it from sight.

This year’s theme is “Leprosy is curable, the real challenge is stigma.” There’s a real call-to-action there. Cadfael reminds us that cures matter, but that the harder work – then as now – lies in dismantling the habits of exclusion that make illness socially incurable.