Abstract：

The most significant characteristic of the medieval society is that the lands of the kingdom were enfeoffed to nobles,resulting in the segmentation of the unified power of the king and further leading to the fragmentation and privatisation of state legal power. In fact,the urbanisation in the Middle Ages was connected to the privatisation of legal power. Taking England as an example,the urbanisation in the Middle Ages was mainly related to small and micro urbanisation and the number of small and micro towns was particularly large, so that it appeared to be a phenomenon of‘overheating ' or‘supernormal'. Why did this happen? In the process of urbanisation, there was no limit for the number of private towns which were built by local lords using their private legal power. Therefore,the urbanisation in the Middle Ages not only was attributed to the economic development from the aspect of commercialisation, but also was resulted by private legal power of the lords.

Published on World History, Issue 1, 2021.