Aristocracy," Economic History Review" (1948) 18#1 pp. 1–53 in JSTOR</ref> 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. 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. 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.J.H. Hexter, 'Storm over the Gentry', in Reappraisals in History (1961) pp 117-62 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." Family history 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