Serial na podstawie książki Kena Folletta. Fabuła:
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Tom Builder is a poor but honourable stonemason who lost his job as a builder because the cruel, sadistic lord William Hamleigh was turned down by young Lady Aliena when he proposed marriage, as Tom Builder was building their new home. Starving and destitute, Tom's wife Agnes dies in the forest while giving birth to their third child; Tom cannot feed the baby boy, and in his grief he leaves the child on Agnes's grave, takes his remaining two children, shy Martha and cruel Alfred, and becomes companion of Ellen and her odd, red-haired son Jack, whom Tom meets accidentally when he thinks that his whole family is going to die in the forest. Alfred immediately despises Jack, because Jack is clever and can read. Alfred's hatred becomes vengeful later on in the story. After many hardships the family settles down in Kingsbridge, where Prior Philip wants to build a cathedral. Young Jack also meets Aliena, and falls in love with her.
Then William Hamleigh discovers that Aliena's father, Earl Bartholomew, has taken the side of the Empress Maud and is therefore disloyal to King Stephen. He takes Bartholomew's castle by force, arrests the earl, and rapes Aliena while her younger brother Richard is forced to watch. Before he dies in prison, Earl Bartholomew asks Aliena to swear that she will never rest until her brother Richard is Earl. Fleeing the castle penniless and alone except for Richard, Aliena sees her father, takes an oath to make Richard earl, and takes up buying and selling wool, and in a twist of fate meets Prior Philip, who agrees to buy her wool for a fair price. In the process they invent the wool futures market: Prior Philip buys Aliena's wool before she has bought it from the sheep-farmers, thus providing liquidity for her business; in return, he buys her wool at a discount. Both go to live in Kingsbridge, where all fight against Waleran Bigod, a selfish, power-driven priest, but eventually the Crown approves the building of a cathedral. Ellen and Tom marry, and Jack is thrilled to see Aliena again.
In the following parts of the book Prior Philip is working hard to turn Kingsbridge into a successful, respectable town, but it is difficult to do so with the civil war raging through England and the battles between Queen Maud and King Stephen, who are fighting over the throne. Jack and Aliena fall in love, but when William burns Kingsbridge (and her fortune in wool), killing Tom in the process, Aliena marries now-wealthy Alfred in an attempt to fulfill her oath to her father. Alfred promises to pay Richard's expenses as he fights against the Hamleighs to regain the Earldom. Aliena makes love with Jack once just before her wedding with Alfred (which is cursed by Ellen), and Jack leaves England heartbroken. Alfred is cold and abusive (he is impotent). Alfred then persuades Philip to let him replace the cathedral's wooden roof with a stone vault. The walls were not designed for the enormous weight of a stone vault and the church collapses, killing 79 people on the day of its consecration. In the rubble Aliena gives birth to a baby with bright red hair like Jack, and Alfred throws her out. Ellen arrives from the forest to see her grandson and advises Aliena to seek out Jack, who was heading for Compostela to look for work. During his pilgrimage Jack meets Moorish scholars and mathematicians in Toledo and helps build Saint Denis Basilica in Paris, thus learning how to build rib vaulting and pointed arches. He is reunited with Aliena in St. Denis. Passing through Cherbourg, Jack learns that his father comes from there (the name "Jack Shareburg" had been anglicised from "Jacques Cherbourg"), and meets his grandmother, cousins, and other family members. But when he comes back to Kingsbridge, Prior Philip denies Jack and Aliena a proper marriage, stating that Alfred and Aliena are still married.
Years later a new cathedral is being built and Alfred suddenly returns to Kingsbridge. Bishop Waleran Bigod and the Hamleighs have teamed up, aiming for the downfall of Kingsbridge, Philip, and Aliena. (They had attempted to build a cathedral at Shiring, but they ran out of money.) Aliena befriends William Hamleigh's miserable young wife Elizabeth and takes the castle of Shiring from within, securing the earldom for her brother Richard and fulfilling her oath to her father. Later Alfred succumbs to his envy for his stepbrother and lust for his own wife; he attempts to rape Aliena and is killed by Richard. William Hamleigh, now Sheriff of Shiring, attempts to arrest Richard for murder. Prior Philip decides that the best thing to do is for Richard to go to fight in the Holy Wars, the Crusades. Richard escapes William Hamleigh and leaves the earldom to be run by Aliena, who can finally, at long last, marry Jack.
Many years pass. Kingsbridge cathedral is finally completed, in the "French Style", and becomes famous around England for its beauty: it is the first Gothic cathedral in England. Jack has solved a vexing problem—transverse stresses from wind, which causes hairline cracks in the clerestory—by independently inventing the flying buttress. In a sudden plan of attack, the bitter Bishop Waleran Bigod publicly accuses Prior Philip of breaking the clerical law of chastity; Waleran claims that the monk Jonathan (Tom Builder's son, now grown, whom he had raised in the monastery) was really Philip's secret child. Jack connects Jonathan with Tom Builder's lost baby, and Ellen swears in court that Jonathan is indeed Tom Builder's son. When Bishop Waleran accuses her of lying under oath, she accuses Waleran of perjury, resulting in a fight and the death of her lover, Jack's father. It is revealed that Percy Hamleigh (William's father), Waleran Bigod, and the former Kingsbridge Prior James conspired to kill the only survivor of the White Ship—namely, Jack Shareburg—to cover up the fact that the sinking of the White Ship was an assassination by powerful barons who wanted to throw the succession into confusion so they could get a monarch they could better control. Bigod is ruined by this scandal, and lives out the rest of his days as a humble monk.
Meanwhile William Hamleigh has gone on leading a miserable, wasteful life, weaving in and out of the political web. His ultimate downfall occurs when he joins a group, under the flag of King Henry II, who plot to assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. Prior Philip happens to be with Becket when the assassination occurs, witnessing everything, and he uses the rage and injustice felt by the people to lead a protest against Hamleigh and the King, claiming Becket as a saint and a martyr. Hamleigh is arrested by Aliena's son, charged with sacrilege (for laying hands on a priest celebrating Mass); he is convicted, and he is hanged. (He does not die well.) The Pope lays an Interdict on Henry's Norman possessions until King Henry repents and is symbolically whipped by Philip (now Bishop of Kingsbridge) and other leading clergymen. At the end the author concludes that royal authority is no longer absolute.
Aktorzy: * Ian McShane as Waleran * Donald Sutherland as Bartholomew * Rufus Sewell as Tom Builder * Matthew Macfadyen as Prior Philip * Sarah Parish as Regan Hamleigh * David Oakes as William Hamleigh * Robert Bathurst as Percy Hamleigh * Hayley Atwell as Aliena * Sam Claflin as Richard * Eddie Redmayne as Jack * Liam Garrigan as Alfred * Skye Bennett as Martha * Gordon Pinsent as the Archbishop * Natalia Worner as Ellen * Anatole Taubman as Remigius * Goetz Otto as Walter * Jody Halse as Johnny Eightpence * David Bark Jones as Francis
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