ABSTRACT
The foundation of most early modern communities was the family, but families could themselves mutate between communities. Two East Anglian examples – the Norths of Kirtling, Cambridgeshire and the L’Estranges of Hunstanton, Norfolk – display a symmetry in cultural attitudes, extending over three generations, that took leading members of each from a regional ‘low’ Anglican orientation under James I to being national icons of High-Tory churchmanship under Charles II and James II and non-Jurors under William and Mary. However, while travelling the same path, they did not do so as a unit. The L’Estranges were very ancient gentry; the Norths relatively recent aristocracy. Their only close genealogical links are that both married a daughter into the Springs of Pakenham, Suffolk and the much later marriage of Roger North’s daughter, Mary, to Sir Henry L’Estrange. A more significant connection, to be discussed shortly, lies in a shared cultivation of domestic music-making and their mutual patronage of John Jenkins, but even that does not outweigh significant differences that allow them to be assessed as independent markers of a wider trend.
