Chapter 3 examines how the open-plan type was adopted in and adapted to the increasingly prosperous (and sometimes increasingly populous) parish churches of larger communities across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Examples include a tightly connected group of churches in the city of Norwich as well as clusters of related buildings in York and London.

Chapter 2 investigates how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the emergence of the open-plan parish church afforded residents of rapidly expanding municipalities the means to build ostentatious places of worship that maximized space, minimized cost, and expressed their ambitions as emerging social agents. Case-study locales include Gorleston-on-Sea (Norfolk), North Walsham (Norfolk), Beccles (Suffolk), King’s Lynn (Norfolk), Dartmouth (Devon), St Ives (Cornwall), and Oldham (Lancashire).

Chapter 6 investigates the ways in which new approaches to parish church design augmented the spatial, visual, and aural experience of their resident communities—with special attention to the roles of boundary-marking installations such as screens, seats, and stained-glass windows. Items of special interest include screens at Woodbridge (Suffolk) and Totnes (Devon); seats at King’s Lynn (Norfolk) and Altarnun (Cornwall); stained glass in various locations across Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cornwall; and the spectacular suite of timber furnishings preserved at Southwold (Suffolk).

Chapter 1 surveys scholarly approaches to the development of the parish church as a spatial/social phenomenon in medieval England. It introduces the example of the “open-plan parish church,” a distinctive architectural type defined by the absence of any structural division between nave and chancel, as a powerful mechanism for analyzing the dynamics of architectural form, architectural function, and architectural facture in late medieval society.

Chapter 5 moves from the municipality to the manor to explore how the open-plan parish church format expedited the exercise of lordly provision, piety, and power in an era of political tumult. Case-study locales include Scottow (Norfolk), Nayland (Suffolk), Long Melford (Suffolk), Denston (Suffolk), Loddon (Norfolk), Shelton (Norfolk), Salthouse (Norfolk), Middleton (Lancashire), Sefton (Lancashire), and a collection of manors associated with the Stanley family in northeastern Wales.

Chapter 4 examines how the open-plan type was adopted in and adapted to the increasingly populous (and sometimes increasingly prosperous) parish churches of smaller communities across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Examples include a tightly connected group of churches in the county of Suffolk as well as clusters of related buildings in Cheshire, Lancashire, Devon, and Cornwall.