You have explained many times that there really isn’t a market for land because of feudal contracts, but how do ‘urban’ property rights work in a medieval setting? Do people own the buildings but not the land? Do they also own the land? Do urban property owners owe any taxes to the city or the lord who controls it?

Great question!

Unless one owned the freehold, then most people didn’t own the land that their buildings were on top of. Instead, what tended to happen was that people would take out very long leases on property. For example, even when Thomas Cromwell hit the big time, becoming Master of the Jewels and Clerk of the Hanaper in 1532, in order to expand his main London residence, he had to take out a ninety-nine year lease from the Augustinian Friars who had been his landlords for several decades. Moreover, there could be very complex chains of sub-tenancies, where people would take out a lease from the freeholder and then rent out properties to people who might then rent out spare rooms, etc.

To answer your question about taxes, if someone was living in a city in the legal sense, i.e a geographic corporation that held a municipal charter, then they were usually not controlled by a lord and would owe taxes only to the monarch, although often the “borough rights” that came with a municipal charter often involved freedom from some forms of taxes and feudal incidences.