England is the first country which completed the urbanization and industrialization, and the issue of English urbanization has always attracted many scholars' attention．Historians have various opinions about the level of the medieval English urbanization．Some of them conclude that the medieval English urbanization was in low-level from a perspective of ‘the political and legal institution’ while others consider it in high-level focusing on ‘urban population’ and ‘non-agricultural industry’. This article surveys those researches from three standards of urban definitions applied by the historians, including institutional, demographic and non-agricultural factors. However, they are sometimes incompatible with each other. More specifically, the third standard of non-agricultural industries is in contrast to the first, standard of institutions. From the standpoints of this article, to re-value the level of urbanization requires to view the orthodox definition of ‘medieval town’ and to analyze the divergence and contradiction among the three factors, providing the theoretical basis for the precise estimation on the level of the English urbanization.

Published on World History, Issue 4, 2018.