The very nature of glass makes its survival remarkable. Throughout England, thousands of church windows retain small, friable fragments of late medieval glass which are now preserved in tracery lights or ‘otherwise turned up, their heels into the place where their heads used to be fixed'. Yet it is not only the fragility of glass that has made its survival unlikely. Apart from Acts of God, such as tempests, hailstones and other natural catastrophes, the cause of destruction has been man, and glass has suffered both at the hands of men and small boys. Late medieval glass was attacked in the assault on images in the sixteenth century at the time of the Reformation and in the seventeenth century during the Commonwealth; and neglect in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, when glass disappeared at an alarming rate, did more damage than Protestant vandalism.The space available on walls and windows allowed for grand illustration.

Walls lacked the compartmental nature of mullioned windows, but mural composition was still governed by and adapted to the architectural form of the building. Paintings of The Last Judgement in the spandrels of a chancel arch, such as Bacton in Suffolk, show how wall surfaces could be utilized.