What is a commensurable unit in early medieval europe?

Answer 1

Something that can be 'compared,' gonna resort to cut and paste...

http://www.answers.com/topic/commensurable
"""com·men·su·ra·ble (kə-mĕn'sər-ə-bəl, -shər-)
adj.
Measurable by a common standard.
Commensurate; proportionate.
Mathematics. Exactly divisible by the same unit an integral number of times. Used of two quantities.
[Late Latin commēnsūrābilis : Latin com-, com- + mēnsūrābilis, measurable (from mēnsūrāre, to measure; see commensurate).]

commensurability com·men'su·ra·bil'i·ty n.
commensurably com·men'su·ra·bly adv. """

The explanation can be heavier than the reality but essentialy a 'commensurable unit' is a way to say that two seperate places/ points in time have comparable elements - - -

http://web.ff.cuni.cz/~lazarus/jjht_memex.html
"""In the context of literary studies, the sudden, and seemingly unlimited capacity to manipulate texts brought with it conceptual problems which, by and large, arose from the purely practical function scholars had considered computers to serve in regards to their research needs (that is, as a reference tool). When it became evident that hypertext was something far more dynamic than simply an information retrieval system—that is, as a medium in its own right (the first verbal medium, after computing languages, to emerge from the computer revolution)—questions again arose as to what constitutes a unit of text, and what are the relevant (or possible) links between textual units? For Landow and Delaney, among traditional (pre-Saussurean) textual units the most recognised “are the word, the sentence and the book”:

To think of them as commensurable units on a linear scale of magnitude might appear natural, but it is also misleading. A word is a conceptual unit, a sentence a syntactical one, a book a unit whose identity is largely determined by its status as a physical object.

Or, following Aristotle, by its symbolic relation to an external, formal unity. However, the integrity of each of these “units” has already been severely tested by writers of the avant-garde, by anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and psychoanalysts, and by philosophers, linguists, and other theorists, and so it has become necessary to arrive at different ways of thinking about textual units as such. The American critic Stanley Fish, for example, considers that “formal units are always a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear; they are not ‘in’ the text.”

In the opinion of Fish, “formal units,” like “intentions,” function nominally: “an intention, like a formal unit, is made when perceptual or interpretive closure is hazarded; it is verified by an interpretive act, and [...] it is not verifiable in any other way.” Further, Fish argues that “meanings are not extracted but made and unmade not by encoding forms but by interpretive strategies that call forms into being.” For Fish, “intention,” like “formal units,” are a product of a decision, and this decision constructs a type of psychological interface between the reader(s) (the “interpretive community”) and the empirical phenomenon of the words on the page. This interface (“interpretive strategies”) describes a textual relation, and by extension we might consider the virtually unlimited capacity of this interface to evolve differing textual relations to define one of the basic qualities of hypertext"""

Peace

Answer 2

Often they used strides and hands for measure, but obviously, these things changed from person to person. So, in order to standardize, they would use the stride and hand breadth of the King. This still meant new standards every few years, and each country had it's own. But it was the start of it all.