The great cathedrals and parish churches that lifted up their towers to heaven were not only acts of devotion in stone they were also fiercely functional buildings. And it is all the more remarkable because the underlying ethos of medieval architecture was 'fitness for purpose'. And although the Anglo-Saxons had a sophisticated building style of their own, little survives to bear witness to their achievements as the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon buildings were made of wood.Įven so, the period between the Norman landing at Pevensey in 1066 and the day in 1485 when Richard III lost his horse and his head at Bosworth, ushering in the Tudors and the Early Modern period, marks a rare flowering of British building.
Romano-British culture - and that included architecture along with language, religion, political organisation and the arts - survived long after the Roman withdrawal.
However, the truth is not as simple as that.
