In the background are doughty labourers, wise women who run the risk of denunciation as witches, fanatics and flagellants and fornicators of all kinds. Ralph is a blunt, vicious villain of the first type Gwenda's brother Philemon, who is full of "the anxiety and self-hatred of the fawning toady", of the second.
The villains of such a reckoning are bound to be on the conservative side, whether noblemen asserting their rights over serfs and servant girls or ambitious clergy who resist any erosion of their privilege, or questioning of their authority. The mercantile world - embodied by Follett in Merthin - embraces it, seeking to force the future into being. The ecclesiastical world fears and suppresses change. The former is "narrow, conservative, mistrustful of new ideas, careless of the interests of the townspeople". Key personnel are Ralph, who will be variously murderer, rapist, outlaw, soldier and Earl of Shiring his brother, Merthin, who will become one of the master builders of Europe the independent-spirited Caris, who dreams of becoming a female physician in a world that will not countenance them and - equally redoubtable in her humbler sphere - Gwenda, who marries the good serf, Wulfric.
Since this chronicle of the later Middle Ages encompasses the most terrible European century before the 20th - with strife, dearth, pestilence, the Hundred Years War and the Black Death - a very large cast of characters is assembled, for their attrition rate is bound to be high. Follett's book begins two centuries after The Pillars of the Earth (in which the building of the cathedral was related). This is historical fiction-making in the grand manner, although the novel is composed in an essentially conventional mode. In World Without End, Ken Follett makes us wait for more than 1000 pages before the letter's secret is confided. Its contents would turn England upside down. In 1327, in a forest outside the cathedral city of Kingsbridge, two men are killed and a potentially devastating letter is hidden.
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