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.