Medieval architecture is the architecture of Europe during the Middle Ages, roughly from the end of the Roman world to the beginning of the Renaissance. In Britain it includes Anglo-Saxon churches, Norman castles and cathedrals, and the successive phases of Gothic architecture, as well as timber-framed houses, manor houses, barns and monastic buildings.
Norman or Romanesque building, introduced after 1066, used massive walls, round arches and bold carved ornament such as zigzag mouldings. From the later twelfth century Gothic architecture spread from France, with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, buttresses and large traceried windows, developing in England into the Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular styles. Medieval domestic architecture produced great halls with open timber roofs, oriel windows and screens passages. The style was revived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the playful Strawberry Hill Gothic to the serious Gothic Revival of Pugin and his contemporaries. Genuine medieval architectural fragments, such as carved stone, tiles and timberwork, occasionally appear on the market but are rare and often subject to heritage protection. Most Gothic-style pieces encountered in the trade are Victorian revival work, which is valued in its own right.
