Jacobean architecture

The influence of Flemish and German Northern Mannerism increased, now often executed by recruited craftsmen and artists, rather than obtained from books as in the previous reign.

Those suggestions were of a most decadent type, so that even the author deemed it advisable to publish a letter from a canon of the Church, stating that there was nothing in his architectural designs that was contrary to religion.

When the Puritans arrived in the winter of 1620 in New England, there was very little time to waste owing to the bitterly cold weather and the fact that many of the occupants of the ship that brought them, the Mayflower, were very ill and needed to get into housing before circumstances could allow the diseases on board to spread further.

Those that were still able bodied had to act quickly and as a result the first buildings of New England most resembled the wattle and daub cottages of the common people back home, especially of places like East Anglia and Devonshire, with the thatched roofs that remained common in England until the 1660s differing only in that the main material chosen for thatching was grass found in the local salt marshes.

[2] Measurements of the archaeological remains of houses owned by Myles Standish and John Alden done in the mid nineteenth and the mid twentieth century in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a town across the harbor from Plymouth, also settled by the original Pilgrim Fathers, and inhabited just eight years later, reveal that the original homes were very narrow and small, averaging approximately forty feet long by fifteen feet wide.

This concurs with the dimensions of houses that would have been found amongst the English commoner classes (specifically yeoman and small farmers) as evidenced by the surviving tax rolls of the Jacobean era.

Examples of original Jacobean architecture in the Americas include Drax Hall Great House and St. Nicholas Abbey, both located in Barbados, and Bacon's Castle in Surry County, Virginia.