42 pages • 1 hour read
Ken FollettThe Pillars of the Earth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
The year is 1142. The tide of the civil war has once again favored Stephen, and so, once again, the bishops and the Hamleighs declare themselves for the winning side. With Walerian, he draws up plans to take up the wool trade that once belonged to Aliena.
Philip and Aliena are despondent at their losses, and Jack takes over the burying of the dead and the rebuilding of the town, which happens quickly. Richard returns from war and demands new knightly accoutrements, but the family's wool business has been destroyed and Aliena is penniless. Without money and the trappings of knighthood, Aliena and Richard will never be able to fulfill their oath to their dying father. Alfred, pressing his advantage, states that he will take care of Stephen’s expenses if Aliena will agree to marry him. Though she loves Jack, Aliena agrees to the marriage.
On the wedding day, Jack is determined to talk Aliena out of it. Philip confines him to a monastery cell for the sin of disobedience. By coincidence, this cell is the very cell in which his own birth father was confined before he was hanged, and Ellen knows of a way into the cell through the floor. She informs him that his father was innocent and helps him escape. He goes to see Aliena and they make love. She insists on fulfilling her oath to her father, however, and so Jack mournfully leaves town with a few provisions and a set of tools.
On the day of the wedding, Ellen curses it as she had cursed her lover’s killers before, with live chicken blood and quick escape. Alfred, still spiteful and superstitious about the curse, cannot perform on their wedding night. “You’re no good to me as a wife” he says abusively (654).
Chapter 12 Summary
Aliena is worried to discover she is pregnant, as she has never consummated her marriage with an increasingly abusive Alfred. Philip regrets the loss of Tom, and especially his heavy-handedness in dealing with Jack. He now relies on Alfred’s substandard building talent and unwisely asks him to step up production.
Months later, Aliena has successfully hidden her pregnancy from Alfred. On the night she goes into labor, Philip plans a ceremony for the completion of the hastily constructed clerestory. There, Walerian announces that William has been made the earl of Shiring, dashing Richard and Aliena’s dreams. Very soon after, the shoddy construction of the clerestory brings it down, crushing several people. Kingsbridge soon falls into ruin, and Alfred leaves Aliena and Kingsbridge and moves to Shiring. A despondent Richard spends his time drinking.
At Ellen’s secret urging, Aliena sells their last possession, a horse, and leaves with her child to see Jack in his rumored destination, the pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela. She travels by boat to France and through France by caravan. In Tours, the baby falls ill and recovers. She follows pilgrims to Spain and meets the wealthy merchant with which Jack lives. The trail leads her to Paris, where they lovingly reunite.
Jack has been studying the architecture of each location, and his knowledge has increased. The couple settles in Saint Denis, where Jack finds work on a cathedral. Later, to avert a riot, Jack notes the phenomena of a weeping wooden Virgin statue, which he knows to be just a trick of climate alteration. Crowds, overawed, throw coins at the statue. Together, Jack and Aliena travel back to England, using the ruse of the statue to collect coins for workers to rebuild the Kingsbridge priory. On the way, the family travels through Cherbourg, where the townsfolk remark at Jack’s similarity to his father; in this way, Jack gets a better image of his father and who he was.
Chapter 13 Summary
Jack and Aliena return to Kingsbridge with an entourage, nearly 100 pounds, and the now-famous wooden statue. Philip is disappointed to learn that Jack has been treating the statue as a bit of miraculous theater, going so far as to hire a falsely-disabled man from the next town over to “walk again” in the presence of the statue. Nevertheless, Jack has also arrived with the blessing of the archbishop of Canterbury, and Philip can see that the statue represents a potential rebirth of Kingsbridge. Jack’s ideas about rebuilding the church are excellent, but he is given an ultimatum. He must live apart from Aliena for a year, and must appeal to the archbishop for an annulment of Aliena’s unconsummated marriage, if he wants to be named the master builder at Kingsbridge. In the interim, Jack finds Ellen making her way in the forest. They coordinate facts about Jack’s father. He was the sole survivor of the sinking of a white ship on its way from France to England. The ship held the successor to the throne, and its sinking led to the current civil war. Jack’s father understood that the ship had been purposefully sunk, perpetrated by the former prior of Kingsbridge, Percy Hamleigh, and Bigod Walerian. These conspirators went on to frame Jack’s father for theft and hang him.
Jack arrives at Walerian’s newly-built castle. In front of the bishop and William and Regan Hamleigh, Jack repeats what he knows about his father and accuses Walerian of perjury. Though Jack fully admits that he can generate no evidence, Walerian is shaken by revisiting the truth of his involvement. “Jack has travelled around—he may have picked up something his mother didn’t know,” says the scheming Reagan (748). They draw up plans to kill Jack by staging another raid on Kingsbridge.
Richard hears about the plan and warns Kingsbridge a few days in advance. After deliberation and quick planning on Jack’s part, the people of Kingsbridge commit to hastily building a wall to defend themselves. The plan works, and William’s attack is repelled and humiliated. As a final act of spite, however, William convinces Walerian to contest the annulment of Aliena’s marriage to Alfred. Though Jack continues to thrive as a builder, and Aliena begins to pull together the threads of her old business, they must continue to keep their love in secret.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
Things continue to go poorly in Kingsbridge, though in this section of the book Follett identifies the source of tension as coming from within rather than without. Though depicted as a well-intentioned protagonist, Philip has blind spots when it comes to leadership, especially as it concerns managing Jack. In an earlier section, Walerian attempts to explain Philip’s philosophy to an incredulous William: “Philip believes that the law should be king,” he says (472). This allies Philip to modern sensibilities, but it also leads him to a strict analysis of situations where leniency would be better.
Because Aliena finds herself less at liberty, she agrees to marry Alfred, though all parties acknowledge Alfred’s shiftlessness and lack of talent. With foresight, Philip could have predicted that Jack would make a much better inheritor of Tom’s work, and a far more suitable mate for Aliena. Nevertheless, because Philip does not acknowledge matters of love, he sanctions the marriage and maintains its sanctity even after it causes a rift in his workforce and a loveless marriage for Aliena. Worse still, he believes that the political maneuvering that works so inconclusively in places of high power will work conclusively with Jack. As a result, he keeps his most active and creative employee cloistered behind church walls or worse, in a prison cell. Philip recognizes only that he is legally in the right in all these matters, when bending the rules (or looking the other way) might have benefitted all parties. Alfred’s terrible work leads to embarrassment for Kingsbridge and a halt to progress. Jack, Aliena, and Alfred all leave Kingsbridge to its fate. Philip is left alone with his strict adherence to the letter of the law.
Redemption comes when Jack and Aliena return with an untrustworthy Weeping Madonna, a sack full of cash, and a score of new architectural ideas. Philip finally acknowledges that “there was a difference between the way God worked and the way Jack worked” (727). Though Jack and Philip will remain in creative tension, Philip learns to compromise with strict legal interpretation, a lesson that signals the rebirth of Kingsbridge.
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By Ken Follett
