I usually  like Ken Follett but this is even better than his other books.  If you like detail and very descriptive scenes.  It makes you realize that people in the early 1100s are little better than animals.  It also gives you a very dim view of the early Christians and the Church. 

 

There was very little honesty in dealing with each other .  The Church was as bad if not worse than the

 population of the little villages.  This is in  the day when the towns were owned by the Church or the Barons and Knights of the area and were considered serfs or slaves.

 

They could own very little as far as property or land.  Women had absolutely no freedom or possession of their  body or anything else.  They  were actually owned by their husbands.  However any other men could come along and do as they wished with them.  The husband could not protect his family against a nobleman or knight.

 

This story is about the building of a beautiful cathedral and all the years of hardships for the builder and the Prior of the monastery where a group of monks lived and the everyday life they experienced in minute detail.  I enjoyed it very much.   It was a book you hate to finish, so I am now reading World Without End,  a sequel to Pillars of the Earth.  It starts in 1327 and things are not much better for anyone.