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Challenging a 100-year tradition that English peasants were serfs at the disposal of their lord, it is argued in this text that tenants were in considerable control of the manorial regime and were able to take advantage of what most scholars have considered to be exploitive and negative aspects of the medieval agricultural economy. Offering a revisionist theory that shifts the focus from labour services required by the lord to capital required by the customary tenant, the author reveals that "peasant economic development" and "manorial economy" are not mutually exclusive terms. Using account rolls, charters, court rolls, and lay subsidy rolls he demonstrates that lords subordinated their power to tax and to extract labour services to a policy of capital maintenance. This allows him to develop a more rational explanation for the growth of markets and wealth in a countryside not exclusively dependent on the economy of lords.