The Pillars of the Earth is a historical novel by British author Ken Follett published in 1989 about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England.

After meeting up with an outlaw named Ellen and her son Jack, whom they had met earlier, the group discovers that Tom's infant has been taken to a monastery cell belonging to the Kingsbridge Priory.

Seeing this as an excuse for them to take their revenge, the Hamleighs take Bartholomew's castle and arrest the earl, forcing Tom and Ellen, now lovers, and their children into homelessness once again.

Philip and Waleran go to King Stephen in the hope of convincing him to give Bartholomew's estates, including a huge limestone quarry, to the church, so that they can be used to pay for the new cathedral's construction.

Homeless and destitute, Aliena and Richard travel to Winchester in the hope of receiving compensation from the king, and visit Bartholomew, now dying in prison.

In order to restore his fortunes so that he can raise an army with which to impress King Stephen, William leads an attack on the quarry, which the Hamleighs had unsuccessfully attempted to barricade against Philip, killing and expelling the priory's quarrymen.

She also strikes up a friendship with Jack, with whom she falls in love, now working as an apprentice mason at Tom's suggestion, but she shuns him after Alfred catches the two of them kissing, being reminded of William's attack on her.

The two stepbrothers continue to be at odds, and Alfred later claims that Jack's father was hanged for thieving, starting a fight that leads to damage and a loss of construction materials.

William proves a hapless and merciless lord who mishandles the earldom financially and routinely rapes any peasant woman he wishes.

Attempting to restore his fortunes, William leads an attack that burns down Kingsbridge and kills many people including Tom Builder.

Freed by his mother, Jack and Aliena make love on the morning of her wedding, and he tries to convince her to leave Kingsbridge with him, but she refuses to do anything that would require her to break her vow to support Richard.

Alfred persuades Philip to replace the wooden roof of the cathedral with a stone vault, but fails to reinforce the structure at the higher levels.

She implies that the White Ship was sunk deliberately, reveals that the three men who framed Jacques Cherbourg were Percy Hamleigh, Waleran Bigod, and Prior James.

Though disheartened, Jack and Aliena agree to stay together, living separately (and occasionally making love in the forest) until the day they can marry.

They are later aided by Alfred, who brings all of the Kingsbridge workmen to Shiring in return for being in charge of the cathedral's construction after Philip is unable to keep paying them.

Inspired by Aliena, Richard organises the starving peasants who have turned to outlawry into a militia, and goes to war with William, robbing him on multiple occasions.

William learns of the location of Richard's forces from Remigius, in return for making the monk the head of Shiring's future chapter, and plans an overwhelming attack to kill all the rebels.

When he arrives, he learns from Ellen that Richard's men have left to join the forces of Maud's son, the future Henry II of England, who has invaded the country on the advice of Francis.

With the help of William's young wife, who loathes him, Aliena is able to allow Richard to capture the earldom's castle before Henry and Stephen's treaty can be made official and the King's Peace restored.

William returns to the village of Hamleigh, and Waleran proposes to sell him the position of sheriff of Shiring so that he can oppose Richard and keep funding the cathedral.

Realising that Richard has no chance of a fair trial due to the attitudes towards marital rape of the time period and the hostility of both William and Stephen towards him, Philip proposes that Richard, who is more suited to be a soldier than an earl, fight in the Crusades as penance for killing Alfred; William would be unable to arrest him, and Aliena would be allowed to look after her brother's lands, therefore giving the earldom both a competent ruler and one willing to cooperate with the priory.

With Philip's conviction certain due to a lack of evidence proving his innocence, Jack and Jonathan attempt to figure out the identity of the latter's father, both being unaware that he is Tom's son.

Later on, William and Waleran become involved with the plot to assassinate Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in order to protect their now crumbling positions of power.

Upon seeing the distraught congregation, Philip is inspired to treat Becket's death as a martyrdom, and urges the assembled people to spread word of the murder across Christendom.

With King Henry refusing to defend Becket's killers, William is subsequently convicted of sacrilege by the efforts of both Philip and Tommy, the son of Jack and Aliena, and hanged.

The former bishop explains that a group of barons had arranged the sinking of the White Ship in order to kill the king's son and heir, with the belief that they would be able to influence the succession and gain more independence from the crown as a result.

While initially content to leave him there, they eventually chose to have him killed after he learned English and started attracting unwanted attention, hiring Waleran, Percy, and James for this end.

Elsewhere, the Pope forces King Henry's public repentance and symbolic subjugation of the crown to the church, in which Philip, now Bishop of Kingsbridge, participates.

In this final scene, Philip muses that the affair has proven the limitations of Royal power; the King could order Becket killed, but faced with the massive popular reaction he had to bow down and let himself be humiliated.

Some of these might be to make the characters and the plot more suited for modern readers while some are clear anachronisms: Three separate board games have been developed that are based on The Pillars of the Earth: A German-Canadian co-production was developed by the Munich-based Tandem Communications and Montreal-based Muse Entertainment, in association with Ridley Scott's Scott Free Films, to adapt the novel for a television movie.