Across medieval Europe political authority was organised through feudal bonds, in which lords granted land (fiefs) to vassals in return for military service and loyalty, while the manorial system tied peasants to the land they worked under a lord's jurisdiction. Land, not salaried office, was the basis of power, and rights over it were layered and conditional rather than absolute. Towns often won charters of liberty that exempted them from manorial dues, creating self-governing enclaves within the rural order. The fragmentation of sovereignty shaped a dispersed pattern of castles, villages, common fields and walled market towns.
Feudal and manorial tenure fixed the rural-urban settlement pattern of medieval Europe and made the chartered, self-governing town a distinct legal and spatial form, the seedbed of later municipal autonomy.