When William Harleston wrote to his ‘neve’, William Stonor, in 1480, warning him against excessive expenditure, he also told Stonor that he trusted to God ‘to see you the worshipfullest of the Stonors that ever I sawe or shall se be my days’. While Harleston has provided historians with an apposite and much-used quotation to illustrate one of the ways that the concept of ‘worship’ was used in the fifteenth century, in his letter he also advances the idea of the Stonors as a sequence of holders of the name who can be knowledgeably compared, one with another. He is suggesting the idea of a lineage, though he had expectations of personally comparing only a limited number of generations of that lineage. Harleston probably agreed with the hope of his lord's father, the duke of Suffolk, that ‘your blood may by his grace from kynrede to kynrede multeplye in this erthe’. He may also have sympathised with a correspondent's dismay when that correspondent's distant relative ‘pleassed hym to take partie with straungers as to his blode … ayenst me’. Bloodline and lineage were subjects to be taken seriously.

In the brief biographies of the eight late-medieval generations of Stonors, mention was made of their marriages, their marriage partners, their children, their second marriages, stepchildren and some affinal kin. These biographies demonstrate that only during Thomas II's lifetime was there a family circle of father, mother, brothers and sisters alive at the same time.