Brother Aelred has remarkably smelly feet. To spare the other monks' noses, he is given the job of tending to the pigs. However, when Viking raiders arrive to attack, loot and pillage the Brothers' monastery, it is Brother Aelred, the humblest, gentlest monk, who saves the day.

* Emerald/Band 15 books provide a widening range of genres including science fiction and biography, prompting more ways to respond to texts.

* Text type - A humorous story.

* An illustrated character web on pages 38 and 39 helps readers to describe Aelred's character.

* Curriculum links - History: Why have people invaded and settled in Britain in the past? A Viking case study; PE: Invasion games; RE: What do signs and symbols mean in religion?

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Emerald Series .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 40 pages in this book. This book was published 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Gillian Cross is perhaps best known for her Demon Headmaster series and its BBC adaptation. She has won many of the most prestigious awards for children's fiction, including the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children's Book Award and the Smarties Prize. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Aidan Chambers is an award-winning children's author and an experienced compiler. He worked for some years as a teacher before deciding to write full time. In 1969 he and his wife Nancy founded The Thimble Press, which publishes Signal, a critical journal devoted to children's literature. His book Postcard from No Man's Land won the Carnegie Medal in 1999. He lives in Gloucestershire. Tim Stevens studied illustration at Camberwell College of Art. He illustrated The Girls in the Velvet Frame (Adele Geras) and Down with the Dirty Danes (Gillian Cross) for HarperCollins. He lives in Suffolk.