Stoneworking declines after the fall of the Roman Empire largely due to the collapse of the Roman logisitical network. As socio-economic and political systems collapsed and regressed to provincial levels, so the movement of large amounts of stone and - perhaps much more crucially - slaves for mass scale stone construction and maintenance got increasingly harder and harder.

Stone construction doesn't die out, it just becomes far more expensive and thus largely the domain of the Church and of elites. In England, stone construction returns with the Augustinian Mission of 597, which sets about restoring the church of Canterbury. Stone construction becomes more commonplace throughout the Early Medieval period as the expansion and consolidation of royal control over ever wider areas makes it much easier to organise the logistics necessary for stone construction.

It can be argued that while stone construction remains more rare throughout the medieval period - it's far more prohibitive when you actually have to pay your workforce - that construction became far more sophisticated. Certainly the Gothic style which developed in the twelfth century - and the English Perpendicular that followed - were capable of supporting much more grand and magnificent structures on thinner and more graceful pillars and arcs than the heavy Romanesque arches and domes that preceded it.