Peter Butterworth as the Meddling Monk (from The Time Meddler")

The Meddling Monk is a fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. He was played by the British comic actor Peter Butterworth.

He appeared in two stories (The Time Meddler and The Daleks' Master Plan, respectively written and co-written by Dennis Spooner) as an adversary of William Hartnell's Doctor.

The Meddling Monk was the possessor of a Mark IV TARDIS and said he left the Doctor's (then unnamed) home planet some fifty years after the Doctor did. This information would reasonably indicate that he was probably a Time Lord, although it was never stated at the time since the concept of the Doctor's race had not yet been devised.

He liked to meddle in history and to change it for his own amusement and for what he considered to be the better -- lending mechanical assistance to the builders of Stonehenge, giving Leonardo da Vinci tips on aircraft design, and, when the Doctor first encountered him, attempting to prevent the Norman Conquest as part of a plan to guide England into an early age of technological prosperity. On that occasion he wore the guise of a monk in order to gain the trust of the 11th-century locals, hence the name by which is most often referred to. (His actual name was never revealed in the series.)

Unlike the Doctor's other Time Lord adversaries, such as the Master, the Monk was presented as a comic figure: a well-meaning but childish man who wasn't half as clever as he thought he was, and who never seemed to realise the seriousness of what he was doing. The fact that his plans always failed to come to fruition, at least on screen, also helped maintain the comic tone and allowed the audience also to avoid thinking too much about how dangerous a person like the Monk could really be.

The Monk has turned up in spin-off novels, notably as one of many old adversaries in a story arc published to coincide with the series' thirtieth anniversary in 1993, where the Doctor encounters alternate realities that have been created due to the Monk's meddling with time again. In the novels, he was given the name 'Mortimus'.