ABSTRACT
Medieval archaeology as a systematic discipline is perhaps a little senior to prehistoric.1 ‘ Gothic’ as a taxonomic concept in the treatment of building design (rather than merely meaning ‘ barbaric’) was in existence in Wren’s time (Harvey, 1968, p. 67) and was fully established in the early nineteenth century (Piggott, 1959; Bialostocki, 1966) by the time Thomas Rickman in his Attempt to Descriminate the Styles of English Architecture (1819) systematized its development in a set of terms derived directly from the material itself and wholly descriptive: ‘ first pointed’, ‘ decorated’, ‘ perpendicular’ (K. Clark, 1928, pp. 16 ff., 95 ff.). Here was a respectable taxonomic model, im plying a whole set of propositions such as the crucial role of the pointed arch, to be tested against the observed data accruing from further research.
