William Hamleigh, Percy Hamleigh’s son, captures the earldom of nearby Shiring. That night, Ellen’s precocious son Jack secretly sets fire to the church, and Tom is elevated the next morning to the post of master builder, in charge of the rebuilding. The priory is quite poor but agrees to take Tom on for temporary work on the crumbling church.

Soon after, Tom Builder’s starving family arrives at Kingsbridge looking for work. Prior Philip, an orphan himself, has recently been elected with the help of Walerian Bigod to head the Kingsbridge priory after the death of Prior James. Tom and Ellen fall in love, joining their families. Ellen informs him that the child, Jonathan, has been adopted by Prior Philip at the nearby Kingsbridge priory. Tom is grief-stricken after his wife Agnes dies in childbirth, forcing him to abandon the newborn. A decade later, in 1135, Ellen meets and assists Tom Builder and his children, Alfred and Martha. Ellen curses the three men and escapes into the forest, where she will raise her boy, also named Jack. Two members of the local church, Walerian Bigod and Prior James, along with a local named Percy Hamleigh, arrange to have Jack framed for the theft of an expensive bowl, and he is hanged in 1125. Jack knows the ship was purposely sabotaged, a truth inconvenient to the local men in power. Jack Shareburg, a travelling minstrel, survives the sinking of the White Ship in 1120, and makes his way to the small village of Kingsbridge. The book was first published in 1990, and this summary refers to the Penguin mass market paperback edition. It centers around the fictional town of Kingsbridge, and of Prior Philip’s attempts to build a church worthy of his temperaments and beliefs. Though these real-life figures appear in Follett’s bestselling work of historical fiction, the book mainly deals with the lives of ordinary people.

Henry II’s feud with Thomas Beckett over ecclesiastical versus monarchic control of the English church eventually led him to attack and kill Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, a shock that carried across Christendom, leading to Beckett’s martyrdom. Maud’s son Henry II ascended to the throne in 1154. Subsequently, England descended into a period historians call the Anarchy, in which Henry’s female heir Matilda (called Maud in Follett’s book and in this summary) and his nephew Stephen went to war over succession from 1135 to 1153. The White Ship sinking in the English Channel resulted in the death of Henry I’s only male heir.

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