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The Pillars of the Earth
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Chapters 14-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
The year is 1152, and Anarchy is still splitting the country. Jack and Aliena have two children now. Their first son, Jack, is nine. Sally, conceived on the travel from Paris to Kingsbridge, is seven. The couple continue to sleep in different houses, per their marital status, and they keep Tom’s daughter Martha as a housekeeper. Alfred returns to Kingsbridge after a long famine to beg for work as a simple mason. Over Aliena’s objections, Jack hires him out of respect for his father. Jack has applied many of the advanced architectural techniques he learned on the continent, giving the cathedral large, airy windows and a tapered shape.
Philip continues to guide 16-year-old Jonathan, the baby Tom had left for dead, through his training as a monk. Richard has thrived as the Head of the Watch in charge of Kingsbridge’s defense. William is in a loveless marriage to a noblewoman named Elizabeth. He enacts wanton cruelty against her and the starving peasants of Shiring, claiming their lands when they can’t pay rent and filling the roads with starving outlaws. Though he commands wealth from his market, the land itself goes to seed. His mother dies, taking her cruel but intelligent guidance with her. The manipulative Walerian instructs William that he should build a church in Shiring as magnificent as the one under construction at Kingsbridge.
On the day of a great storm, Aliena takes shelter in a village called Monksville and is surprised to find Elizabeth traveling as well. Aliena pities Elizabeth and gives her some advice about how to take control of domestic affairs within a royal household. Hours later, they step out from shelter to discover that the town has been ruined by the storm. Such devastation means a winter of starvation and violence for the commoners. “It’s going to be a bloody winter,” notes Aliena (807).
The effects of the downturn soon come to Kingsbridge, and when Jack’s workers must make do with less, their guild votes for a work stoppage. After preliminary negotiations, Jack and Philip are dealt a blow. The workers at Kingsbridge have been offered everything they want plus a raise in pay to come work under William Hamleigh on the Shiring church. “All I have to say to you is that you deserve everything you’re going to get,” says an angry Jack (826).
Chapter 15 Summary
William squeezes the peasants and stockpiles grain during the famine in order to drive up the price to pay for his church. As the winter sets in, Kingsbridge faces attacks from shambolic groups of starving and desperate outlaws. Aliena and Richard devise a plan to organize the outlaws, with Ellen’s help, to take back their father’s earldom and fulfil their oath to him. Francis visits Philip. He informs him that he has been advising Maud’s son Henry that Stephen’s rule is crumbling.
Through the winter, Richard begins to organize small guerilla attacks on William’s storehouses, while William continues to act with unchecked villainy. In one such attack, William faces Richard directly, losing a few men-at-arms, horses, sacks of flour, and his composure before his subjects. He and Walerian coordinate, with Remigius acting as a spy, and soon they discover Richard’s hideout. They build a battering ram to take out the Kingsbridge wall and assemble 200 men. Yet when they find themselves in the outlaw’s hideout, they find only Ellen, who curses them all and informs them that Richard is marching with three thousand men led by Henry, Maud’s son.
Stephen surrenders quickly but forces a compromise. He will rule until he dies, at which point Henry will be his successor. This leaves a legal morass in which Richard and Aliena become the rightful heirs of the Shiring earldom, but which leaves William in its control for the foreseeable future. Richard and Aliena plan a subterfuge; she will pose as a messenger while William is away, enter the castle, and lower the drawbridge, allowing the castle to be taken by force. The bulk of the guards and servants have little love for the cruel William, and so with Elizabeth’s help, Aliena and Richard take the castle with minimal resistance.
Chapter 16 Summary
Two years later, and the famine has ended. William finds himself in relative poverty. He lives in the village of Hamleigh, stewing over his misfortune. He is victim to nightmares in which his soul has been condemned to hell. Walerian approaches him with a new scheme: he will loan William a hundred pounds and make him the Sheriff of Shiring. With his new-found appointment, he begins to generate the funds to continue building Walerian’s church, thus securing his place in heaven.
With William as Sheriff, Philip contemplates a petition to the King to make Kingsbridge its own borough. On the road, he discovers Remigius, now living in dire poverty. Philip forgives him for betraying him and asks him to come live as a simple monk at the priory.
Richard, the new earl of Shiring, sticks stubbornly to the letter of the law, keeping the Shiring quarry for himself. Aliena reminds her brother of his debt to Kingsbridge, but Richard is too interested in hawking and hunting to rule with the generosity and steadiness of a great leader. Though Shiring thrives compared to the previous famine, Aliena sees that it can do much better.
Aliena and Jack have been living in their strange, unsanctioned relationship for ten years now. When Philip complains of Richard’s ingratitude, Jack sharply rebukes him. “After I brought you the Weeping Madonna and built a town wall to protect you from William, you announced that I couldn’t live with the mother of my children. There’s ingratitude,” Jack says (881). Aliena announces her reluctant intention to leave Jack. “We’re doomed to live this way forever—unless we part,” she says (882).
Soon before Aliena is set to leave, a starving Alfred, now out of work, breaks into her home. Once again, he asks for mercy, but Aliena tells him to go away. Enraged, he attempts to rape her. Richard enters the house, and in the ensuing fracas, Alfred dies, mourned by none but his sister Martha.
William acts to get a king’s writ to arrest Richard for murder and waylays him outside of the Kingsbridge priory, where he claims sanctuary.
Quickly, Aliena, Philip, and Richard come up with a plan. Richard will sneak away to join the second crusade. In a year or two, he will return a hero, his sins absolved. The politically astute Aliena will take over the administration of the earldom. Richard, whose main virtue was always in war, is happy to oblige. Philip, of course, regains control of the Shiring quarry. Soon after, Aliena and Jack marry, and Aliena begins the first year of a thoughtful and prosperous rule.
Chapters 14-16 Analysis
The penultimate section of The Pillars of the Earth features dynamic turns of fortune. It begins with Kingsbridge at a low point with William deeply ensconced in power and ends with the recapture of the Shiring earldom by Aliena and Richard.
Key to the success of Aliena and Richard’s reclamation of power is the terrible economic condition of Shiring and the surrounding countryside. Weather and blight have affected everyone, and rather than tighten his own belt, William hoards grain at the expense of his people. Though this is a story of great figures leading by example; for the first time in the narrative, the people take a prominent role.
In the world Follett describes, leaders derive legitimate power from order, reason, strong character, and the rule of law. These modern ideas set the heroic protagonists apart from their medieval peers, who rule through might and inheritance. However, one modern ideal is glaring by its absence in Follett’s book, and that is the right of people to govern themselves through democratic means. The single act of democracy in the book is through a vote held by the mason's guild over their negotiated rights with Philip to control the nature of the work stoppage. This ends disastrously, as Alfred manipulates the whole crew to abandon work at Kingsbridge in favor of their enemy, William at Shiring. As a rule, Follett depicts the people as one of two things: either they are industrious people willing to pitch in voluntary labor for the absolution of their sins, or they are a starving mob driven to criminality.
Such mobs, in Follett’s view, are easily led, particularly by those with even a modicum of adherence toward order and reason. Richard, who elicits very little respect from those around him, is nevertheless able to corral and guide the mob produced by William’s famine to make successful raids on William’s storehouses. None of this speaks to Richard’s sudden enlightenment. In this world, mobs are simply feckless, purposeless, and eager for leadership. After Richard regains his earldom, the mob simply recedes into the story, presumably satisfied by the young earl’s success. This section’s happy ending hides the potential for a dim, authoritarian, and ideologically modern interpretation.
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By Ken Follett
