Lawrence Stone

Christopher Thompson, for example, showed that the peerage's real income was higher in 1602 than in 1534 and grew substantially by 1641.

Many other scholars entered the fray and the so-called storm over the gentry became a central theme of English historiography for some time.

Stone's suggestion that "affective individualism" did not become widely characteristic of marriage until the 18th century was questioned by medievalists who pointed to evidence of loving marriages before 1700.

Lawrence Stone (4 December 1919 – 16 June 1999) was an English historian of early modern Britain, after a start to his career as an art historian of English medieval art.

He is noted for his work on the English Civil War and the history of marriage, families and the aristocracy.

Stone was born on 4 December 1919 in Epsom, Surrey, England.

He was educated at Charterhouse School, an all-boys public school (i.e., a private boarding school).

He studied for a time at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1938.

He then studied modern history at Christ Church, Oxford from 1938 to 1940.

His university studies were interrupted by service during the Second World War as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

He returned to Oxford after demobilisation in 1945, and after a further year of study, graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1946.

His BA degree was promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Oxon) degree in accordance with the regulations of the university.

After graduating, he remained at the University of Oxford.

From 1946 to 1947, he was a Bryce Research Student.

He then worked as a lecturer at University College, Oxford between 1947 and 1950.

A 1948 article was Stone's earliest venture in the quantitative study of the rise of the gentry and decline of the aristocracy along the lines that his mentor R.H. Tawney had suggested in 1941.

In 1950, he was elected a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

As such, he was a college tutor in history, and moved specialising in medieval history to Tudor history.

For two years, from 1960 to 1961, he was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

In 1963, Stone left Oxford and joined Princeton University as Dodge Professor of History.

He served as chairman of the Department of History from 1967 to 1970, and in 1968 became the founding director of the Davis Center for Historical Studies, which was established to promote innovative methods of historical research.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and the American Philosophical Society in 1970.

Stone in 1970 summed up the causes of the English Revolution by stressing three factors: the Crown's failure

to gain an army or a bureaucracy; the relative rise of the gentry in terms of status, wealth, education, administrative experience, group identity, and political self-confidence; and the spread of Puritanism.

Rabb notes that "few contemporary Stuart historians would argue with Stone's assessment."

Stone moved from the study of the political importance of families to studies of their internal structure, helping to open up the field of new social history.

In The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) Stone used quantitative methods to study family life.

The book was very well received.

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Keith Thomas described it as "easily Professor Stone's most ambitious book yet, even though it comes from the pen of a historian who has by now produced some 3,000 pages in hard covers. Lawrence Stone is one of the most buoyantly invigorating figures on the contemporary historical scene, and his new work displays his usual attributes: voracious reading, a striking capacity for synthesis and an ability to write vivid, continuously interesting prose... He has offered an indispensable chart to a landscape which it will take at least another generation of historians to explore with any precision. Indeed, The Family, Sex and Marriage is reminiscent of one of those pioneering maps from the age of discovery."

Writing in the New York Review of Books, J H Plumb said "Professor Stone raises vast issues, settles them provocatively, and underpins his solutions with a wealth of illustration."

Joseph Kett, in the New York Times Book Review, said "Vast in theme, exhaustive in research and with a cast of characters beyond counting, the result is a veritable War and Peace of social history. Truly, this is scholarship on the grand scale."

Some of his suggestions have been qualified by historians.

He retired in 1990.

Stone died on 16 June 1999 in Princeton, New Jersey, aged 79.

He had been living with Parkinson's disease.

Stone began as a medievalist, and his first book was the volume on medieval sculpture in Britain for the Pelican History of Art.

He was a bold choice by the series editor, Nicholas Pevsner, but the book was well received.

He concluded there was a major economic crisis for the nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Stone's argument was marred by methodological mistakes and he came under heavy attack from Hugh Trevor-Roper and others.

However, it was never Stone's position that love in marriage did not exist before the 18th century, and his book does not, in fact, say this.