The Architecture of Medieval England

Houses, guildhalls, Merchant Adventurers’ halls, crowd-funded churches, chapels, almshouses, schools, bridges, city walls - they were all built by the merchants. Writings on English late medieval architecture between the Black Death of the mid-14th century and the Reformation of the 16th, the period characterised stylistically as Perpendicular, have usually ignored the class of patrons who built most. A merchant could be anyone from a small trader operating at a local level to a very rich member of a City Livery Company in London, and any who could afford to build did so. They built either as individuals or in collective enterprises, their intention being both to save their souls after death and increase commercial opportunity, seeing no incompatibility between these aims.

Basing her work on original sources, including building plans, architectural expert Nicola Coldstream shows how much of what we still see today as characteristically English architecture came to be.