Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Tables and Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaching the Stonors and their Papers
- 1 The Stonors: A Gentry Family Biography
- 2 Lineage
- 3 Landed Estate
- 4 The Stonors' Lords
- 5 Early Social Networks: Judge John to Thomas I
- 6 Later Social Networks and Gentry Values: Thomas II and William
- Conclusion: Gentry Networks, Culture, Mentality and Society
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Approaching the Stonors and their Papers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Tables and Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaching the Stonors and their Papers
- 1 The Stonors: A Gentry Family Biography
- 2 Lineage
- 3 Landed Estate
- 4 The Stonors' Lords
- 5 Early Social Networks: Judge John to Thomas I
- 6 Later Social Networks and Gentry Values: Thomas II and William
- Conclusion: Gentry Networks, Culture, Mentality and Society
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is more than three-quarters of a century since Charles Lethbridge Kingsford first edited and published the Stonor letters and papers. Nevertheless, no historian has used the abundance of material they contain to study the life and times of this particular late-medieval family. This is surprising, given the wealth of available studies about some other gentry families. For example, it is more than eighty years since the famous Pastons were first set in their England, and, following this pioneering study, a number of other authors have used the Paston letters to write about the family. Among the more recent of these studies is Richmond's three-volumed consideration of the family and their close connections, described as ‘illuminating facets of aristocratic life that Bennett neglected or scarcely touched’. The mercantile Celys and their world of the wool trade have also been the subjects of a study that was completed over twenty years ago. Even the Plumpton collection, which is less than half the size of the Stonor, has attracted some attention in the literature. It seems particularly surprising, therefore, that no major study of the late-medieval Stonor family and papers has been published, despite the re-issue of Kingsford's edition of the papers that appeared in 1996 in one convenient volume.
This lack of attention may be because most of the letters in the collection were written to the Stonors by others, rather than by the Stonors themselves. Consequently, our understanding of the personalities of the family members is less well developed than is our understanding of the Pastons. Indeed, fewer than half of the Stonor documents are letters. By comparison, Norman Davis’s edition of the Paston letters contains 930 numbered items, of which over 800 are letters, with nearly 350 of these written by members of the Paston family. Kingsford estimated the Stonor collection to hold around 600 documents in total. Since then an additional 152 other documents (or fragments) relating to the family have been found in the Public Record Office and re-filed as one set. This set contains only two letters, the rest being a mixture of expenses, accounts, receipts, rentals, writs, lists and miscellaneous documents. Therefore Kingsford’s count of 256 letters (excluding fragments) requires little modification. However, members of the immediate or nuclear family have written only forty-four of these letters, the men of the family writing twenty-three, and the women (wives, sisters and mothers) twenty-one.
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- Information
- The World of the StonorsA Gentry Society, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009