St John in he Forest was a miniature version of Kingsbridge Priory

St John in he Forest was a miniature version of Kingsbridge Priory. The church was small, as were the stone-built cloisters and dormitory; the rest of the buildings were simple wood- frame structures. They were eight monks and no nuns. In addition to their lives of prayer and meditation, they grew most of their own food and made a goat’s cheese that was famous throughout south west England.
Godwyn and Philemon had been riding for two days an it was early evening when the road emerged from the forest and they saw a wide acreage of cleared land with the church in the middle. Godwyn knew at once that his fears were true, and reports that Saul Whitehead was doing a good job as prior of this cell were, if anything understated. There was a look of order and neatness about everything; the hedges trimmed, the ditches straight, the trees planted at measured intervals in the orchard, the fields of ripening grain free of weeds. He felt sure he would find that the services were held at the correct times and conducted reverently. He had to hope that Saul’s evident fiftness for leadership had not made him ambitious.
Hey rode into the farmyard and dismounted. The horses immediately drank from the through. There was no one but a monk with his robe hitched up mucking aout a pigsty behind the stables. He was sure to be a youngster, doing a job like that. Godwyn called to him. ‘Hey, you, lad! Come and help us with our horses.’
‘Rightho!’ the monk called back. He finished cleaning out the sty with a few more passes of his rake, then leaned the tool up against the stable wall and walked towards the newcomers. Godwyn was about to tell him to get a move on when he recognized the blond fringe of Saul.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

They arrived in Wigleihg early in the evening.

They arrived in Wigleihg early in the evening. The village stood in a rise,its fields sloping away to all sides, and it was always windy. After two weeks in the bustle of Kingsbridge, the familiar place seemed small and quiet, just a scatter of rough dwellings along the road that lead to the manor house and the church. The manor was as large as a Kingsbridge merchant’s home, with bedrooms on an upper floor. The priest’s house was also a fine dwelling, and a few of the peasants houses were substantial. But most of the homes were two-rooms hovels, one room normally being occupied by livestock and the other serving as kitchen and bedroom for all the family. Only he curch was built of stone.
On the far side of the hundred acre field, half hidden in the trees at the edge of he forest, was her home. It was even smaller than the peasant’s hovels, having only one room, which was shared with the cow at night. It was made of wattle and daub: tree branches stuck upright in the ground, with twigs interwoven basket fashion, the gaps plugged with a sticky mixture of mud, straw and cow dung. There was a hole in the thatched roof to let out the smoke of the fire in the middle of the earth floor. Such houses lasted only a few years then had to be rebuilt. It now seemed meaner then ever to Gwenda. She was determined not to spend her life in such aplace, having babies every year or two, most of whom died for lack of food. She would not live like her mother. She would rather die.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

In the west front of the cathedral

In the west front of the cathedral, nearly fitted into one of the towers, was a work room for the master mason. Caris reached it by climbing a narrow spiral staircase in a buttress of the tower. It was a wide room, well lit by tall lancet windows. All along one wall were stacked the beautiful shaped wooden templates used by the original cathedral stone cavers, carefully preserved and used now for repairs.
Underfoot was the tracing floor. The floorboards were covered with a layer of plaster, and the original master mason, Jack the builder, had scratched his plans in the mortar with iron drawing instruments. The marks thus made where white at first, but they faded over time, and new drawings could be scratched on top of the old. When there were so many designs that it became hard to tell the new from the old, a fresh layer of plaster was laid on top, and the process began again.
Parchment, the thin leather on which the monks copied out the books of the Bible, was much too expensive to be used for drawings. In Cari’s lifetime a new writing material had appeared, paper, but it came from the Arabs, so monks rejected it as a heathen Muslim invention. Anyway, it had to be imported from Italy and was no cheaper than parchment. And the tracing floor had another advantage: a carpenter could lay a piece of wood on the floor. On top of the drawing, and carve his template exactly to the lines drawn by the master mason..
Merthin was kneeling on the floor carving a piece of oak in accordance with the drawing, but he was not making a template. He was carving a cog wheel with sixteen teeth. On the floor close by was another, smaller wheel, and Merthin stopped carving for a moment to put the two together and see how well they fitted. Caris had seen such cogs, or gears, in water mills, connecting the mill paddle to the grindstone.
He must have heard her footsteps on the stone staircase, but he was so absorbed in his work to glance up. She regarded him for a second, anger competing with love in her heart. He had the look of total concentration that she knew so well: his slight body bent over his work, his strong hands and dexterous fingers making fine adjustments, his face immobile, his gaze unswavering. He had the perfect grave of a young deer bending its head to drink from a stream. This was what a man looked like, she thought , when he was doing what he was born to do. He was in a state like happiness, but more profound. He was fulfilling his destiny
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet