The Tudor architectural style is the final development of medieval architecture in England and Wales, during the Tudor period (1485â1603) and even beyond, and also the tentative introduction of Renaissance architecture to Britain. It followed the Late Gothic Perpendicular style and, gradually, it evolved into an aesthetic more consistent with trends already in motion on the continent, evidenced by other nations already having the Northern Renaissance underway Italy, and especially France already well into its revolution in art, architecture, and thought. A subtype of Tudor architecture is Elizabethan architecture, from about 1560 to 1600, which has continuity with the subsequent Jacobean architecture in the early Stuart period.
In the much more slow-moving styles of vernacular architecture, "Tudor" has become a designation for half-timbered buildings, although there are cruck and frame houses with half-timbering that considerably predate 1485 and others well after 1603; an expert examination is required to determine the building's age. In many regions stone architecture, which presents no exposed timber on the facade, was the norm for good houses, while everywhere the poorest lived in single-storey houses using wood frames and wattle and daub, too flimsy for any to have survived four centuries. In this form, the Tudor style long retained its hold on English taste. Nevertheless, "Tudor style" is an awkward style-designation, with its implied suggestions of continuity through the period of the Tudor dynasty and the misleading impression that there was a style break at the accession of James I in 1603, first of the House of Stuart. A better diagnostic is the "perpendicular" arrangement of rectangular vertically oriented leaded windows framed by structural transoms and mullions and often featuring a "hooded" surround usually in stone or timber such as oak.