In making that statement one is led unawares into one of those generalisations that contains less than half the truth. The life had indeed gone from the larger, the official architecture, the art of the Church, of the commune. After this there was little more than a sorry tale of rapid degeneration, until the French and the Jesuits came with their new style, either clever and often in good taste at the hands of the secular power, or tawdry and rococo when popularised by the new religious order that was the first incarnation of that “efficiency” that in the end became the obsession of the world and the root of the war. It is true that the new fashion rapidly superseded the dying and disintegrating spirit of mediævalism, and never a Bruges town hall or a Malines cathedral came again; instead we get the dull and blundering seventeenth-century portion of the Ghent Hôtel de Ville and the showy and very vulgar Jesuit churches, such as that in Antwerp (attributed to Rubens) and the Cathedral of Arras. On the other hand, and this is too often forgotten, the degradation of state architecture always precedes by many years, sometimes centuries, the downfall of the people’s art, and after a great era of high character and cultural attainments the burghers and lesser nobility, the farmers and merchants and smaller monastic houses continue instinctively to build beautifully, prolonging the old traditions, unhampered by clever architects and the commands of irresponsible fashion, until at last even they succumb and their art falls to the dead level of the stupid artifice that for long had prevailed amongst the great of earth. So in France while the barbarities of the Louvre were being perpetrated, the loveliest little châteaux and farms and village churches were rising almost as though nothing had happened; so in Germany, Heidelberg and Dresden could not prevent the Tyrol and Rothenbourg, Hildesheim and the Black Forest and the Rhineland from creating the eternally delightful timber houses that far more exactly expressed a racial quality that was to endure in all its fineness, until the end of the nineteenth century saw its ending as well. So in England, Henry VIII and Edward VI might destroy the then vital art, and Elizabeth might expunge its very memory, building ridiculous semi-German conceits to the grief of the judicious; nevertheless the deep-lying tradition prevailed outside court circles and those of the Erastianised Church, and the sixteenth-century domestic architecture of the Cotswolds, of Surrey, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Essex--indeed of almost every county in England--was, in its way, just as good architecture as that which universally prevailed before the “Great Pillage.”