English 11/American Literature

Jumping back to 2020 for a blog where I REALLY went in depth. (I may have been struggling with quarantine and online teaching here)…

Section 1; Page 1-225

Well, like I said in my previous post, I’m at least farther this time in reading the book than the first time, but I’m just not sure about the book.  Yes, it is interesting to learn things about the 12th century (for instance, a chimney while building a home was a radical idea rather than just a basic, yes, we should have a way for the smoke to go out thought about constructing), but I don’t know if I like these characters.

First off, there is Tom Builder.  His last name is his job, which is interesting as a way to think of how last names came about. He is a mason who builds things, so why not just call him that. I guess I would have at some point come from both a free man (my maiden name) and a man whose father was named John. So I have been thinking about this aspect lately.

But he seems to make a lot of really bad choices to start off.  First of all, maybe don’t get a rich man mad at you.

Yeah, he fired you and almost ran over your daughter, but he seems like someone who you don’t want to be on the bad side of.  Rich, land-owning people at this time have ALL the power (and maybe still a lot of power now, but let’s not get into that here…) and there really aren’t any social safety nets in England 1137.

For instance, after Tom made William mad, Tom wandered with his family for months without work, without money, and his wife Agnes was pregnant the whole time.  AND THEN he decided that he needed to chase down the man who stole their pig.  Granted yes, this pig was worth at least a year’s worth of money, but waiting for a whole day in the rain to end up killing this guy…

Again, I wonder why I’m reading this book.

But that isn’t even the part of my first section that was the most difficult to read.  When Agnes died after giving birth in the forest in the winter (what a horrible horrible way to go), I thought that was bad enough.  But then Tom decided that they needed to leave the LIVE BABY ON THE GRAVE TO DIE –

I was done with him.  Done.

But I kept reading and he decided this was a bad idea (duh, dude) and then went back, but the baby had disappeared (luckily we learned that a monk had found the baby and was took him (the baby) to the monastery).  So all of this plot info (and my opinion of it all) really was leading up to an idea I have about what Follett is trying to say here.  Maybe there is an overall theme of the fragility of life, or of the harsh reality of life in the 12th century.

Most of the first section focused on the story from Tom’s perspective, but then it switched to Philip, the prior of the monastery that found the baby.

He is probably the only character that I really like.  He was on a trip to visit the archdeacon of his whatever (there were a lot of church terms in this part) when he encountered Tom and Ellen (a lady he met after Agnes died who he is now in a relationship with…apparently in this time period you don’t really mourn dead people too long because people die all the time of everything, and you just move right on to the next lady to help you raise your children).

Ellen was in the prologue of the book as a pregnant lady who cursed a priest, monk, and some others for hanging the father of her unborn child. This was actually really intriguing and this mystery of why these men hanged the boy and why they fear Ellen continued to come up.  Follett does a great job of keeping my interest (even though I don’t like many characters, and I think life during this time period is horrific, and the book makes me feel angry a lot).  When the archdeacon Walerean (who was the black haired priest that was cursed in the prologue) sees Ellen, he is TERRIFIED and talks to himself about how she can be alive and all of that.  I want to know the deal with her and her connection to Walerean and why they hanged her baby’s (Jack is the kid’s name) dad.  So I guess I’ll keep reading until the next time.

On a final note, I now know what a trencher is.

In Romeo and Juliet, one of the servants uses the term and I’ve never actually known what it is.  But here it is: “yard-long loaves of white bread” cut “into thick slices to be used as trenchers — edible plates.” The more you know…