[3] Stone began as a medievalist, and his first book was the volume on medieval sculpture in Britain for the Pelican History of Art.
A 1948 article[8] 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.
[9][10] 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.
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...
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.
However, Stone never argued in favor of creating "laws" of history in the manner of Karl Marx or Arnold J. Toynbee.
Along the same lines, Stone was very fond of combining history with anthropology and offering "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz.
In 1979, at a time when Social History of the previous generation was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a revival in historiography of the narrative.
Stone defined narrative as follows: it is organized chronologically; it is focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive rather than analytical; it is concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical.