First of all, I have to admit I can't really tell why this work has the title "Thomas Of Reading". Thomas is a character here, to be sure, and he lives in the West England town of Reading – his full name is Thomas Cole, but he's no more important than any other character here, even the major ones.
Thomas is one of nine makers of clothing in England during reign of Henry I, about 500 years before the date that this novel came out, a time when the textile industry grew to enormous importance in England, historically as well as in this fictional world. These nine men, in the west and north of the country, travel to London on business regularly. They each employ about forty workers full time, and hire various specialists like carders, weavers, and so forth, as well. So they're plenty rich and important, so much so that the king himself grants them pretty much whatever they want in the work's early pages.
In other words, this is one of the earliest prose works to take as its subject the middle class manufacturer. Previous novels generally dealt with nobles and knights and whatnot. Then too, although this piece like a lot of previous work is more episodic than not – it tells a bunch of short incidents about many of the same people – this one tells several plotlines that stretch from beginning to end. That is, with "Thomas Of Reading," we start to see a number of developments that will stretch and develop in fiction right through to the present day.
Not that all those throughlines have to do with the nine clothiers – it's more like those nine men have some involvement with the stories we read, and they frequently touch them off. One such involves a young and very beautiful woman named Margaret, the daughter of parents who have been exiled, who decides that her best option is to go to a local fair where rich people go to hire household servants and get herself a job. Her new employers, as it turns out, are one of the nine clothiers and his wife. Pretty soon, the king's brother Robert, who at one time tried to get the throne for himself and is therefore a political prisoner (although being a royal he does get a lot of privileges, such as the right to travel pretty freely under guard), spots Margaret, falls head over heels in love, and plots to escape from his guards with her and renew his rebellion. Things don't end very well.
The individual stories divide pretty evenly between dramatic ones like that and more comic tales. The work can be a bit difficult to read – unlike some of the other ones on the 1001 Books list, this one was written in English and therefore wasn't translated into a modern idiom, and the English here is a little older than Shakespeare's, so it's not too familiar but understandable with a little practice. So a bit challenging in a lot of ways, but pretty familiar altogether, especially when it comes to the sort of people we encounter.
Benshlomo says, If you recognize the characters, you can deal with the language.
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