The survival of the letters of the Stonors, first published by C. L. Kingsford in 1919, makes the family an obvious candidate for a detailed study, and, as Noble points out, it is surprising that such a study has for so long been lacking. Yet, as a source, the letters have strong limitations. Most of them are addressed to, rather than composed by, members of the family, revealing, as it were, only one side of an overheard conversation; and, for the bulk of the period they cover, the letters themselves are not enough to sustain a worthwhile narrative family history. Only the careers of Thomas Stonor (d. 1474) and his much more interesting son, Sir William, are there meaningfully revealed. The Stonor archive outside the letters—the deeds, accounts, court rolls, and so on—is not complete enough to offer any more than limited compensation for these deficiencies. Further, the story of the family is intrinsically much less interesting (although probably more typical) than that of the Pastons and the Plumptons, the only two other late medieval gentry families to have left significant correspondence. There are two reasons for this comparative lack of dramatic content. First, as Noble remarks, the Stonors lived, geographically and socially, in “a far more stable, placid and self-contained world” (16) than those of either the Pastons or the Plumptons. Until Sir William unwisely involved himself in the duke of Buckingham's ineffectual rebellion against Richard III, the family appear almost untouched by the dramas of late medieval national politics. Second, it is a curiosity of the family's history that its successive heads lived to experience that world only briefly as adults. Remarkably, as Noble shows, no Stonor heir inherited as an adult between 1354 and 1474, and between 1361 and 1445 there were as many as forty-seven years when the family had no adult head. The author thus sets herself an ambitious task in producing a coherent and compelling account from a source that is less promising than it at first appears. She makes that task the more difficult by making little attempt to flesh out the letters by a diligent search of the records of central government. The author, no doubt, would defend herself against this charge by arguing that her purpose was not to produce a detailed family history but to use the letters to describe “the Stonors’ mentality, their values and expectations” (69). Undoubtedly, however, she could have made the letters speak more eloquently had she exploited other sources more comprehensively. Further, a neglect of other sources leads her into error. It is not true, for example, to say that those Stonors who remained esquires escaped distraint: Thomas Stonor (d. 1432) was distrained in 1430, and Thomas Stonor (d. 1474) in 1458 and 1465.

The difficulties of Noble's evidence are exacerbated by her tendency to ask of it curiously inappropriate questions. This is most clearly exemplified by the recurring discussion about how far individual heads of the Stoners were typical “gentry.” She writes as though the family were, throughout their history, aspirants to that rank rather than, from the time of Chief Justice Stonor (d. 1354), among the richest gentry families in England. It is hard to see the relevance to the Stonors of the author's convoluted observation that the role of gentry “involved constructing an identity from markers of gentility that had fluid social meanings” (37–38). No doubt this “role playing” had a meaning for those on the borders of gentility; it had none for families, like the Stonors, whose wealth so emphatically identified them with a gentry elite. After the justice's time these “markers of gentility” were intrinsic to rather than acquired by them. Indeed, the author demonstrates, without averring the conclusion, how typical the Stonors were of that class of greater gentry of which, generation after generation, they were unquestionably a part: they held the major offices of county administration; were able to make reasonable provision for their children beyond the heir; and, once established, made few property acquisitions, whether by purchase or marriage.

Nonetheless, these criticisms aside, Noble's work is not without merit. She employs the letters sensitively and revealingly in her discussion of the social networks and values of the two best-documented members of the family, Thomas and Sir William Stonor. She demonstrates, interestingly, the family's generally positive experience of wardship and the mutually supportive relations that might develop between stepfathers and stepsons. The tendency of heads of the family to die young gave their widows plenty of time to provide their sons with both stepfathers and siblings of the half blood. Noble shows, particularly in documenting the close relationship between Thomas Stonor (d. 1474) and his Hampden half-brothers, that these imports to the family could provide patronage and connection that compensated the son for the financial loss entailed by the mother's survival. In her discussion of lineage, she suggests, revealingly, that the errors found in contemporary genealogies often arose not out of self-conscious attempts by compliers to mislead but rather from their failed efforts to make sense of the defective evidence available to them. The past was thus, without deliberate fraud, “reconfigured to match current desires or circumstances” (59). In summary, Noble has produced a serviceable and fitfully insightful introduction to the letters. Had she been less diffident in her approach, she would have achieved more.