ABSTRACT
Privileging so-called feudal lordship and fidelity and slighting other types of relationships among nobles, the model also suppresses social differences among lords and among fideles to the point of reducing all instances of feudal lordship and fidelity to a single form. In the depoliticized form of “a definition of the obligations created by the vassalic contract,” the letter has long provided the basis for what this chapter calls the juridical model of classical feudalism, which F. L. Ganshof identified with “the system of feudo-vassalic institutions” during a period running from the tenth to the thirteenth century. In negotiations configured in accordance with the transactional model, each party relied on one of two different strategies to represent himself as the other's creditor: maximizing his own claims on the other and minimizing what the other had already done to discharge them; minimizing the other's abstract claims on him and maximizing what he himself had already done to discharge them.
