By the castle-town in the late middle age (or the early castle-town), the author means one during the age from 15th to the beginning of 17th century. It consisted of retainers' dwelling places and commercial sections assembled together around the foot of a castle.<br> The elements of the groups which composed a castle-town were firstly a castle and it's lord's residence, secondly retainers' dwelling places and thirdly merchants' quarters. Most of the castles took a form of Yamajô (a mountain castle) and Hirajo (a castle on a flat land) style and their lord's residence was generally called Ondoi or Yakata. Attached to the residence, there was invariably a wide ground for military use.<br> The reatiners' dwelling places centered around the residence. Most of the dwelling places belonged to prominent retainers and were by no means possessed by numerous retainers, and there were also dwelling places belonging to servants of lower ranks. There was a limit to the number of retainers living in a castle-town and they were not yet to be town-consumers.<br> Plane diagrams of retainer's dwelling places were irregular and assumed a loosely compact form, while the merchants' quarters called Ichimachi (_??_) formed the economic center containing also craftsmen engaged in munition industry.<br> In contrast with the retainers' dwelling places, the merchants' quarters had the form of a crowded town. The merchants and craftsmen were required to live in separate parts in accordance with their birthplaces and not with their trades.<br> Early castle-towns are divided into two kinds, one being rural castle-towns (_??_) and the other semi-urbanized castle-towns (_??_). In a rural castle-town the market right was not independent z but in a semi-urbanized castle-town it was independent and the merchants' autonomous system was complete, although subject to strong control of lord. Thus a characteristic of a castle-town was in its being the lord's town.<br> The retainers' dwelling places and the merchants' quarters confronted each other in an inharmonious form. In other words, the former were like a farming village, while the latter a town. Consequently when the retainers' dwelling places and the merchants' quarters were transformed into a town under a joint townplanning, an early castle-town became a modern one. Such a modern castle-town was an urbanized castle-town was an urbanized castle-town, to be called a later castle-town against an early castle-town in the preceding stage.<br> How were the above characteristics of an early castle-town formed? It seems that they were due to the next two elements. One was the system of agrarian soldiers (we cannot tell a soldier from a farmer), and the other was the character of trade area. The former regulated the retainers' area, and the latter restricted medieval economic functions, dimensions of the castle-towns, and compositions of the trade area.