Circle of Days by Ken Follett-Book

From a Google Image Search – People.com

In the Pillars of Earth, Ken Follett got us involved in the building of a Gothic cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge. Many readers already knew the architectural features of classic Gothic cathedrals right down (or up) to the flying buttresses. It was one of Ken Follett’s finest novels. Obviously, cathedrals were not a primitive undertaking. Societies and population had to reach a certain point before such a building might be needed or even imagined.

In Follett’s newest book, Circle of Days, he weighs in on the speculations of how a place like Stonehenge could have been built before the age of machines. His words draw for us a possible moment in time when tribes of people occupied a fictional Great Plain. He gives us the flint miners, the herders, the farmers, and the Woodlanders. The herders have more time to think about eternal questions like the human spirit and practical matters like seasons, the heavens, and math (counting) all of which affect the herds of cattle they protect. Herders’ duties were not constant burdens as were the survival struggles of the other groups.

Often the fortunes of a tribal group depended on the temperament of the leaders. Follett’s farmers have a cruel authoritarian leader, who does not respect the boundaries of the other tribes and who exercises absolute authority over everyone (especially women).

Herders happen to have a council of leaders who make decisions after discussion by majority agreement. It’s not voting but it’s similar, although only involving a small group of elders.

Woodlanders are more primitive than other tribes. They love their woods which provide them with all their simple needs. They stay hidden and speak a language of their own.

The herders have built a circle of tall tree trunks joined by a wooden lintels and arranged in pairs. They have priestesses who know how to count, something others have trouble mastering beyond what they can see on their fingers and toes. The priestesses know how long a year is. They memorize songs which keep their knowledge in a form that can be passed on to new priestesses. They know about equinoxes and solstices, although not necessarily by those words. Four times a year they perform the songs, and they count. The tribes gather and travelers come to trade. The flint miners play a large part in these markets.

But because these are humans, the tribes do not always live in harmony. When there is a years-long drought, those who are cruelest seem to have better survival skills because these leaders have no boundaries and will steal land or cattle or woodlands, exercising a sort of early imperialism. When the farmers (the men only) decide to divert the midsummer market, which is the biggest market, from the monument of the herders with the circle of trees, they burn down the circle to rob the herders of the ceremonies that bring travelers to the village near the circle.

Because of the moral character of some of the herders (mostly the women) the priestesses refuse to be beaten. Joie, daughter of the wisest woman Ani, has seen a field of giant stones out on the Great Plain. She wants to build the monument circle out of these giant stones so they cannot be destroyed.

Follett tells the story of how he thinks they did it. Are humans with extraordinary talents, born at the right moment, responsible for the progress of human societies? Follett seems to suggest that is true. This project is not as complex as building a cathedral but, considering that the population of the area was much smaller and the social structures so much simpler, we have all wondered and speculated about why Stonehenge would have been imagined and how it could have been built.

Reading about the state of humans on and around the Great Plain is made interesting by giving the people in the story names, personalities, families, sexual structures that helped prevent inbreeding, and by creating a crisis that brings out the best and the worst in his characters. Even more interesting is Follett’s theory of how this magical circle was built which stays close to our current educated guesses about how such primitive people could produce such a sophisticated monument involving a detailed knowledge of astronomy, in particular the movements of the sun and moon. I found the novel enjoyable. Perhaps you will too.

The Armor of Light by Ken Follett-Book

From a Google Image Search – Lit Stack

Ken Follett’s fifth book in the Kingsbridge series is The Armor of Light. The Pillars of Earth is the most famous book in the series covering the era when the cathedral was built in Kingsbridge in fascinating, if fictional, detail. Reading this book enticed me to finish the rest of the books. Although not quite as good as The Pillars of Earth, all the books in this series tackle different eras in British history. The Evening and the Morning tells a story of the Middle Ages. World Without End brings readers to Kingsbridge two centuries after the building of the cathedral. A Column of Fire immerses us in the period of the Reformation. The Armor of Light focuses on the ways progress in the textiles trade affected the residents of Kingsbridge along with the involvement of England in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte.

In each case Follett writes about the injustices that arise from having only two classes, the wealthy who control government, laws, and the courts, and the worker class at the mercy of the rich who show little or no compassion. He uses real historical moments and peoples them with fictional characters we can relate to. In Part I, The Spinning Engine, 1792-1793 we meet Sal Clitheroe, her unfortunate and beloved husband, Harry, and their son Kit. They are picking turnips and loading a cart under the watchful eyes of the Squire’s son Will Riddick, a coldly entitled and incompetent overseer. They are serfs who are paid tiny wages for hard physical labor. The workers can see that the cart is overloaded and not safe, so they are not surprised when a wheel breaks and Harry is trapped underneath. When Harry dies a distraught Sal has to fight for Poor Relief, she has to let her six-year-old son go to work polishing boots at the Manor House. Sal’s challenges are unending because she must stick up for herself and Kit, usually unsuccessfully as employers would rather fire injured workers than pay them, and the courts are manned of the powerful aristocrats or church officials. One church official says, “I’m not in the business of feeding other people’s children.” (An Anglican church leader talking of Methodists) (p. 49)

Here we have the moment when cottage industries must give way to machines, in this case a spinning jenny that spins 8 threads at a time, and right on its heels, a machine that spins 48 threads at a time. Housewives in cottages tend to produce 3 threads per day.

In Part 2, The Revolt of the Housewives, 1705, when inflation arrives because of war with France bread becomes very expensive. Eventually, the housewives who don’t have enough grain to make their own bread become an angry crowd when they find that Kingsbridge has not bid high enough to stop their grain from going to another town. Local bread will be costly, and supplies will run out quickly. The housewives do not want the flour to go to another town when they will be left with no grain. Again, there is Poor Relief, but it is difficult to get enough to live on as Harry’s widowed wife Sal learns. Bread has become unaffordable just as people are losing jobs because of the new machines at the mills, a conjunction of events that can lead to social pandemonium. The militia is called to stop the insurrection of the housewives, but these local boys won’t fire on their neighbors. Steam machines are more reliable than those that run on the water from the river so workers must adjust to new methods and new job insecurities once again.

In Part 3, when workers try to form groups to be able to force owners and gentry to inform workers when more efficient machines continue to replace workers Parliament passes The Combination Act in 1799 which makes it illegal for workers to gather to try to get protections from owners who tend to keep advances in technology secret (to unionize). One owner imported “scab” workers from Ireland when workers tried a strike. In Part 4 we meet The Press Gang, 1804-5. As the war escalates England needs more and more soldiers. “My guess is that about fifty thousand men have been forced into it (the military),” Spade (David Shoveller) said. “According to the Morning Chronicle there are about one hundred thousand men in the Royal Navy and something like half of them were impressed. Part 5 finds Britain at war with the French led by Napoleon Bonaparte and most of the men and older boys from Kingsbridge go off to war. Wars are often social levelers. When the war is won Parliament passes workers’ rights reforms begin to create fairer conditions.

There are plenty of characters whose lives intertwine with the events related to the workers’ rights battles exposed in Follett’s book. Some marry, have affairs, have children, and form same-sex pairs which must be kept secret. Some run afoul of the gentry or the factory owners and suffer out-sized consequences because the same people that own and run the factories also control the courts. If you like to learn history while enjoying the literary presentation of fictional characters affected by that history, Ken Follett is someone who does a great job with both.

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett – Book

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett was a must-read for me since I have read most of Follett’s books. The Kingsbridge series covered the ages when the great cathedrals were built. The books paint pictures of life in the days of guilds and the builders who were forerunners of Christopher Wren. This particular Follett offering is a prequel to the other Kingsbridge works. It is very early in the history of towns and we are in an England that is still rough, still being attacked by Viking raiders. There is a King but his attention is focused on stamping out the Viking raids that leave towns burned to the ground, that kill many English people, and that rob English subjects of any treasure that can be found from simple tools to expensive textiles and jewelry. If you live along the coast or on a river that can be reached from the coast an attack could come without warning in almost any season.

While the King is busy, some of his officials and priests and bishops are robbing everyone blind. Between corrupt and greedy leaders and Viking raids life is tenuous and depressing. From the bottom up citizens copy their leaders and are mean and brutal. Slavery is accepted if the slaves are conquered in a foreign war. Cathedral building is further advanced in Normandy than in Britain. Where there is a cathedral there is most likely a city. And, where there is a great builder, there is likely to be a great cathedral.

Edgar Builder is our handsome hero. He is the most talented of three brother who learned from their father how to build ships. Ship building skills can be useful in all kinds of building and Edgar is a creative person who understands innovation. His world is turned upside down when the coastal village where his family builds their ships is burned out by Vikings, his father is killed, and all his father’s tools are stolen. Edgar was just getting ready to run away with a married lady who was abused by her first husband. He was in love. That doesn’t go well and it affects Edgar deeply. Edgar’s mother is not a retiring woman, She negotiates some farmland in another village for her and her three sons.

The new village is a mean place and this is not a farm family, but they do manage to thrive because of the talents of the mother and of Edgar. The nearest town is Shiring ruled by three entitled brothers, Wifwulf, Wynstan, and Wigelm. Each one is a piece of work. Wifwulf finds a bride from an aristocratic family in Normandy. Ragna is young and lovely and not in the least submissive or stupid and yet these three brothers make her new life hard, hard enough to make a normal woman quit. But not Ragna.

It’s a love story and a story of corruption. Shiring already has a cathedral, but the Kings Bridge cathedral finally gets a start after many trials and enough abuse of power to ignite any readers sense of injustice. Life offers only the most minor and easily squashed victories. The novel was both a piece of historical fiction and a bodice ripper and not at all my favorite of the Ken Follett books in this series, but I could not stop reading it and if has left vivid scenes to play out in my mind.

Column of Fire by Ken Follett – Book

Column of Fire by Ken Follett is the third book in the Kingsbridge Series and my least favorite of the three. It’s not that it was difficult or did not tell a story. It was not so terrible that it made me set it aside or stop reading. I liked the fictional characters placed among the actual historical figures enough to wonder what would happen to them but I did not feel strongly invested in them. I always realized they were fictional and there to involve the reader in the events occurring in the mid 1500’s and beyond in England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Religion was the key issue of these times after the declarations of Martin Luther and the beginnings of a Protestant movement that was growing and alarming Catholics. Protestants thought they could talk directly to God without a priest as intermediary. They published Bibles in national languages, rather than Latin, so people could read the Bible by themselves or in church services. They did not feel any allegiance to the Pope in Rome. Catholics saw Protestants as heretics and felt it their religious duty to crush them and their interpretation of Christianity. As Column of Fire begins Protestants are hunted by Catholics, considered criminals by royals, and must practice their religion in secrecy. But this book also covers the pivotal moment when events, especially in England, turned this dynamic around. By the end of the story Catholics are on the defensive and, at least in England, Protestants can worship without fear.

Since England had recently lost Queen Mary Tudor, a strongly Catholic queen, there were two women who could possible take the throne, Elizabeth Tudor, tolerant of Protestantism, and Mary Queen of Scots, strongly Catholic. The story of how Elizabeth took the throne and how she held it against Catholic sympathizers who stood to lose both their brand of religion and lots of power and money has fascinated readers for centuries. Elizabeth held her throne with the help of talented spies and one of these spies was William Cecil.

Ned Willard becomes one of Cecil’s spies, moving in and out of France, with family in Spain for a while (Barney Willard), who later becomes a shipper and a ship’s captain adding more clout to Ned Willard’s information network. There is a villain, in fact there are two and they are just about as hateful as you would like them to be. Pierre Armande de Guise is an ambitious, soulless creature who uses information he steals through his first wife Sylvie Palot, a list of important Protestants in Paris, to ingratiate himself with the de Guise family and to realize his life time ambition of being a royal (however tangentially). Rollo Fitzgerald, brother of Ned’s first love Margery trains a group of sinister priests and hides them in English households for when Mary Queen of Scots takes the throne from Elizabeth, and an invasion plan is afoot.

Even with the historical drama of this critical time in Europe the book never really taps into that drama. Women are expendable and are damaged by the villains but few men are and there is just little tension and fright in most of the telling of this story. Fortunes do switch from the Catholic Fitzgeralds to the Protestant Willards but Ned is never in any real danger and seems more like a nice guy than a spy. So, what we get in Column of Fire by Ken Follett is a good story, but not a great story.