The passages that struck me were "a corporeal act, generally of a symbolic character, was indispensable, and in the case of homage this act was the immixtio manuum. When one remembers the legal atmosphere of the time and takes into account the incapacity of the early medieval man for thinking in abstract terms, and one recollects his taste for the concrete and actual, one can understand how in his eyes the essential element in becoming a vassal was that of making some gesture of the hands," (page 73) and "in the first half of the eleventh century there was at least one man alive who was well acquainted with feudal relations in practice and whose intellectual development rendered him capable of expressing them in abstract terms," (page 83) emphasis mine. Quotes and page numbers are from FL Ganshof, Feudalism, 3rd English edition (1963).
I've always thought that mankind has been roughly on the same intellectual level for all of history, outside of advances in technology and educational structure. Is there any other record that would indicate that the medieval commoner would struggle with abstract thought? For specificity's sake, I am most interested in France and the Angevin empire around the 12th century, but any responses would be appreciated.
I've always found Ganshof to be patronizing towards his sources, privileging the idea of an 'institution' as a reflection of the advancement of culture. Given his focus on formal legalistic frameworks and institutions , it's not surprising that he sits in judgement by this restricted scale of competence. This approach has been eclipsed by a sociologically and anthropologically more even-handed approach to medieval societies since the 60s. In a word, the idea that there was an 'inability' to think or 'express' in abstract terms is just nonsense primitivism reinforcing aspects of 'dark ages' ideology.
The fact that some of these same habits - clasping of hands, kissing - continued through the pivotal centuries of the development of real legal medieval institutions (12-13th centuries) and beyond suggests that Ganshof was waxing ideologically. I should note here that this was not some sole fault of Ganshof's, just the biases of historians brought up in the classicist or scientist mode. There are still some of those around :)
Michael Clanchy approaches the question of these 'legal' actions differently in From Memory to Written Record and he charts them not as a question of 'intellectual development', but rather as what was priority in a culture and needed for the organization of information. It may be worth contrasting that to Ganshof. So too Frederic Cheyette's essay Suum cuique tribuere on the question of 'What is Law?' in the medieval period.