One of the main issues in the transition from feudalism to capitalism debate has been the role of the peasantry who have been seen by many as a hindrance to the progress of agricultural development: their decline, and the transition from a rural society dominated by feudal lords and peasants to a tripartite society of landowners, capitalist farmers and wage labourers, has been seen as crucial in setting England apart from much of early modern Europe. It is illustrative of the changes which many historians of this period think rural society underwent between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that medievalists generally refer to the majority of small-scale agricultural producers as peasants whilst their early modern counterparts refer to this group in society by the more neutral terms of their form of tenure. The decline of the peasantry is a narrative, moreover, which has been fraught with disagreements, ranging from Alan MacFarlane's view that England has never possessed a true peasantry to the debate surrounding peasants and class conflict in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between Michael Reed, Dennis Mills and Roger Wells. These disputes have often arisen at a terminological level rather than an historical one, primarily because of problems with defining the peasantry: how important were property rights, market-orientation and cultural inheritance in peasant societies?

Peasants have traditionally been presented as a hindrance to agricultural progress, with Postan, Hilton and Brenner emphasising their inability to reinvest in agriculture because of the high levels of feudal rent they endured. They placed the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of feudal lords, many of whom ‘tended to spend up to the hilt on personal display, on extravagant living, on the maintenance of numerous retinue, and on war’. Mark Bailey has criticised these interpretations as ‘a tendency to stereotype medieval lords as rapacious extractors of peasant surpluses’, but he went on to concede that ‘landlords did not develop sophisticated notions of profit or returns to capital invested … they certainly expected good returns … but did not look to maximise profits. Their landed estates continued to be regarded more as a mark of status and privilege than as business enterprises.’