The principal buildings erected during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were houses, and it is mainly in connection with domestic architecture that we must seek to trace the development of the new style. There were but few churches built after the dissolution of the monasteries, and we have no examples of sufficient importance to show how ecclesiastical architecture would have been affected. There are chapels, chantries, and fittings, such as screens, pews, pulpits, and fonts, but nothing on a large scale. We have already seen how such comparatively small and isolated features were affected. It is necessary, therefore, to look to the numerous houses that were built in order to see what progress the new ideas made. The character of a house is largely determined by its plan, and the plan is the expression of the wants and habits of the inmates. Accordingly we find that the wants and habits of English people, being far less susceptible of change than their taste in ornament and decoration, caused the plan of their houses to follow the old lines long after the superficial decoration had taken on itself the foreign fashion. The one quality which the Italian influence gradually introduced into the plan was symmetry, and this could be obtained without sacrificing the arrangements which seemed essential to English habits. In later days an Italian feature, the open loggia, was often made use of in the form of an arcade, but even this had its English precedent in the cloisters of the monks. What were the essential points about the plan of an English house? The most important place was the hall, which was the nucleus of the whole series of apartments. Then there was the kitchen with its adjuncts; and there were the private apartments for the family, of which the chief was the "parlour." The arrangement which naturally established itself was that the kitchen should be located at one end of the hall and the parlour at the other. This relation of rooms had existed from a very early period, and it is in the developing of this idea with more or less elaboration and skill that house-planning consisted down to the time of Inigo Jones, when the hall gradually ceased to be the centre of household life, and became merely an entrance. To the central group of hall, kitchen and parlour were added what other rooms were required for convenience or defence; but in regard to the latter, precautions against attack had already become less necessary in Henry VIII.'s time, and they were practically disregarded in Elizabeth's, when considerations of stateliness and display chiefly influenced the design, at any rate as far as the larger houses were concerned.