The High Scaffold Correspondence
Letters and Calculations from a Medieval Tower Site

About this book:

In the summer of 1372, Master Mason Jonas of Bury arrives at the Abbey of Saint-Jude-in-the-Fens with one impossible mandate: build a tower four hundred feet high on ground that sinks beneath every footstep. His weapon is not a sword but a ledger, his battlefield a quarry of blue-grey limestone, and his story arrives in ink-stained letters, margin notes, and pocket-book calculations sent to Brother Thomas, the abbey’s cautious keeper of the stone.

This is medieval construction as you have never seen it—gritty, obsessive, and alive with the ring of steel on rock. From the wrong delivery of crumbly yellow stone to the terror of a crack beneath a flying buttress, Jonas battles bad mortar, thinner iron, and an abbey tempted by false economy, all while the tower climbs toward the clouds and one miscalculation away from ruin.

For readers who love the quiet drama of human ambition pressed against stone, sky, and stubborn earth, *The High Scaffold Correspondence* is an intimate epic of arches, ashlar, and the men who risked everything to reach the height of the tower.