It can not be said that the yeomen, the sawyers, the joiners, the hog-raisers, the merchants, or the carpenters of Jamestown Island--and we know many by name and exactly where they lived there--were interested in the continental, classical or Renaissance ideas in architecture which were commencing to be fashionable among the rich and affluent. It was, on the contrary, those very same poorer classes, ill-affording and not understanding the Renaissance fads, who were the most reactionary of all in their approach to building methods. They loved medieval architecture. They doted on their Gothic heritage, whether it were a diamond-pane casement or a stock floor plan for a traditional house. By the year 1615--eight years after the founding of James Fort--the great English architect, Inigo Jones, had taken home from Italy a number of books by Palladio, distinguished Italian architect in the classical manner, and by 1622 had completed the important banqueting hall at "White Hall," London, replete with rows of classical pilasters. But the Virginia settlers--probably at least ninety-five percent of them--knew nothing of Inigo Jones and Palladio, because, in their arts and crafts thinking, the colonists were overwhelmingly medieval. We come, now, to the three English styles of architecture prevalent in Virginia in the seventeenth century: the Medieval, the Jacobean, and the Transitional. The first two were common throughout that hundred years, but the third, the Transitional, began about 1680 and extended about one-third of the way into the eighteenth century. i. THE MEDIEVAL STYLE [Illustration: Medieval One-Bay Dwelling (c. 1670) in Va. Restoration by Author] The buildings represented by this first style should be spoken of as "Virginia Medieval Architecture," because that is what the style is. "Colonial" and "Early Colonial" are technically not correct names for the style. This particular manifestation in architecture belonged to the style, English Medieval; it was the direct product, not an "afterglow," of the Middle Ages.