During the age that brought the great flowering of the English language in the work of Shakespeare, Jonson, and the King James version of the Bible there also emerged a truly English style of architecture and decoration that has had a romantic appeal ever since. So strong was this appeal to the Victorians that they were to christen it `Jacobethan' and incorporate it into numerous houses of their own period in England and America. From the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 to James I's death in 1625, a delayed Renaissance swept England, and pervaded the domestic architecture and interiors of the day. Far from taking on a purely Italianate style, however, a peculiarly English form emerged, which was not only to be expressed in the great houses, the typical castle-palace of the period, but also in the smaller houses of town and country. This illustrated book shows not only the magnificence of the architecture through specially commissioned photography of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses, but also plunders the great pattern books of the time to show the roots of the often wild elaboration of the period. In architecture and in furnishings, classical detail was constantly fused with a Tudor venacular, to create a style that has been enduringly popular up to the present day.