Crispin: The Cross of Lead

In an English village in 1377, a thirteen year old peasant boy known only as Asta's son loses his mother and, within days, finds himself falsely accused of theft by the scheming steward John Aycliffe, who has him declared a wolf's head, a legal status that makes him an outlaw anyone can kill without punishment. The village priest, Father Quinel, is about to tell the boy his real name and the truth of his birth when Aycliffe's men murder the priest first, leaving the boy only a lead cross engraved with words he cannot read and the name Crispin, which the priest managed to give him before he died. Crispin flees into the forest and falls in with Bear, a huge, jovial traveling entertainer who is secretly plotting against the nobility on behalf of the peasants, and Bear takes Crispin on as a servant, teaching him to juggle and to survive on the road while slowly drawing out his trust. The two make their way to the walled city of Great Wexly, where they learn that the local lord has just died, and Crispin, sent into the manor to search for Bear after Aycliffe's men capture him, discovers that the inscription on his lead cross names him as the lord's illegitimate son, exactly the secret Aycliffe has been killing to protect. Crispin bargains for their lives by swearing to renounce that claim, and when Aycliffe breaks the oath at the city gates and tries to kill him anyway, Bear hurls the steward into his own soldiers, whose swords impale him; Crispin lays his cross on the dead man's chest and walks out of Great Wexly with Bear, choosing the life of a free traveling performer over the identity the cross could have given him.

Avi tells the story in Crispin's own plain, increasingly confident voice, and the book moves briskly, closer to a chase than a meditation, with real danger on every road and in every town gate. It reads easily for its age group and rewards readers who like their history worn on the sleeve, muddy roads, feudal law, and all, rather than explained in footnotes.