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Unfree labour by free peasants: labour service in the Swedish and Finnish countryside, from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marjatta Rahikainen
Marjatta Rahikainen*
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki, Finland Email: smrahikainen@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article discusses the received image of free Swedish and Finnish peasants, charting parallels with peasants in the Baltic region. It draws upon the post-Cold War discussion of free and unfree rural labour in early modern Europe. The discussion maintains that the labour service by free Swedish and Finnish peasant landholders and peasant tenants at its heaviest point may have been on a par with the corvée in the early modern Baltic provinces. It is suggested that the Cold War mental map may have led to an overstatement of the East-West distinction between peasants’ circumstances in the Baltic Sea region.

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Type
Research Article
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Rural History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , October 2020 , pp. 121 - 134
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Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

In 1978, Jeromy Blum presented in his The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe a map of ‘the servile lands’ of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In the map, Sweden escaped the label of ‘servile land’. Yet, Blum's characterisations of the ‘servile lands’Footnote 1 would nevertheless have largely applied to eighteenth-century Sweden. Even though peasants in Sweden were personally free by law, a large number owed labour service to the Crown, a landowner or an ironworks proprietor.

The portrayal of Sweden in Blum's map is an example of the long since established image of Sweden ‘as an historical residence for an emancipated peasantry’ (M. Olsson, referring to E. Heckscher).Footnote 2 Swedish historians have for some decades now debated this received image. The Swedish historian Janken Myrdal places the Swedish case closer to a general European development. He argues that in the High Middle Ages in Sweden, ‘something very like serfdom was customary for those who were freedmen, or rather “half-free”’. Moreover, Sweden ‘took on a social structure that in its basic contours would have been recognizable across much of Europe’.Footnote 3 This article is intended as a contribution to the discussion, only it includes Finland and charts parallels with peasants in the Baltic region.

The Swedish discussion is part of a larger debate that has taken place after the end of the Cold War about the history of the manorial economy and unfree labour in Europe. In this discussion, some historians now interpret serfdom and the relationship between peasants and lords in Europe in relatively lenient terms, whereas others, among them Sheilagh Ogilvie, maintain a critical perspective.Footnote 4 Alessandro Stanziani has compared the forms of bonded labour in Britain and France with serfdom in Russia and Central Asia.Footnote 5

In the context of this discussion, Marcus Cerman has called into question the ‘traditional concept of an agrarian “dualism” dividing Europe along the river Elbe’ and its distinction between Gutsherrschaft and Grundherrschaft, which gained ground in the ‘Cold-War environment’.Footnote 6 The two concepts were originally presented by the German historian Georg Friedrich Knapp, who wrote after the unification of Germany. In terms of politics, therefore, for him the Elbe did not divide but unite: the lands east of the Elbe (rechts der Elbe) were ‘the new Germany’ of the late Middle Ages.Footnote 7 In the 1920s, Knapp's definitions still served a historian of the German countryside, but by the 1970s this was no longer the case.Footnote 8 However, by then the image of the Elbe as dividing Europe in the east versus west was efficiently established. Thus, Robert Brenner could write as follows: ‘Finally, in Europe east of the Elbe we have the familiar story of the lords entirely overwhelming the peasantry, gradually reducing through legislation peasant personal freedom’. In her critical comments to Brenner, the German historian Heide Wunder remarked that with his ‘east versus west Elbian Germany’ Brenner had ‘fallen victim to the Prussian myth (Hohenzollerlegende)’.Footnote 9

Swedish historians studying the history of the manorial economy took a stand on the Grundherrschaft-Gutsherrschaft discussion. After laborious archival studies, they were able to present information on the amount of labour service and its share of land rent in several larger manors. In their analysis, early modern Sweden appears basically Western.Footnote 10 In a more recent contribution, Mats Olsson explicitly asks whether the changes in Scania/Skåne went towards ‘the eastern Gutsherrschaft or the western Grundherrschaft’.Footnote 11

However, in the discussion below that focuses on labour service by free Swedish and Finnish peasants, the Grundherrschaft-Gutsherrschaft framework does not appear appropriate. From the perspective of the peasants who performed labour service, what mattered were how many days and what kind of labour the service indicated, under what kind of conditions the work was undertaken and whether they had to use their own horses, their most valuable personal property. These were everyday concerns, overshadowed by graver ones in troubled times.

Labour service has a wide-ranging history in Europe east of the North Sea and the English Channel.Footnote 12 Labour service, or corvée, appeared profitable to manor owners. This was because, as Michael North writes, ‘the Early Modern auditors considered only expenses in money and kind’; in their view, ‘the labour cost nothing, whilst wage labour raised the costs of production’.Footnote 13

Although compulsory labour service was generally connected with serfdom, it may have been extracted by the landowner from free peasants as land rent. In addition to land rent in labour, money and/or kind (grain, butter, forage, charcoal, etc.), there were usually other duties and liabilities required of peasants. There are examples of aversion to labour rent, and heavy labour service tended to provoke resistance by peasants.Footnote 14 The amount of labour service varied from a couple of days per year to six days and over per week; furthermore, it could be unregulated or by order. In the recent discussion, the labour service of one to two days per week is thought to have been a ‘relatively light’ burden and three to five days per week a heavy one. ‘The most unfortunate German serfs’, as Sheilagh Ogilvie writes, ‘owed “undefined” (ungemessene) labour services.’Footnote 15

Moreover, from the perspective of peasants, it seems to have made a difference whether their landowner was a private nobleman or the holder of a high office.Footnote 16 In the former case, land rent in labour and duties was manifestly a sign of subservience, whereas in the latter case, labour rent had an air of paying taxes. Peasants would have agreed with Adam Smith, who considered paying taxes oneself as a sign of a freeman: ‘It denotes that he is subject to government.’Footnote 17

This article has the character of a discussion paper. I start by briefly presenting the Swedish expansion politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led to the annexation of ‘corvée societies’ into the Swedish realm. In the next section I present the main lines of the institutional changes in landownership and their consequences for the peasants’ obligations to the manor owners. I then proceed to discuss labour service, first by free Swedish peasants and then by free Finnish peasants. It took a long time for labour service to end in the Swedish and Finnish countryside. In closing, I reflect on the impact of the legacy of the Cold War on the discussion on the history of free and unfree labour in rural Europe.

The Swedish expansion in ‘corvée societies’

Agricultural labour dues, or corvée, emerged in the Baltic Sea region during the same centuries that brought new conquerors and rulers of German origin. By about 1550, in the regions today known as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, most peasants had been made unfree serfs pressed into corvée labour. In regions that today are included in Sweden's southern provinces but were until the mid-seventeenth century part of Denmark, peasants did corvée for manor owners.Footnote 18

In Sweden the arrival of the first German conqueror in 1363 brought with it one of the heaviest periods in the history of the peasantry, as Janken Myrdal describes it. Four kings of German origin ruled there from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, and the power struggles ended only with Gustav Vasa (ruled 1523–60).Footnote 19 During his reign, Sweden started to invest in military competence to prepare for aggressive expansion politics that would then continue for a century.Footnote 20

Swedish expansion towards the south-east over the Baltic Sea commenced in 1561, when the nobility of Estonia/Estland decided to submit to Sweden for protection against Russia. During the reign of Gustav II Adolf (1611–32), Sweden conquered Ingria/Ingermanland (1617) and Livonia/Livland (1621).

In Estonia and Livonia most peasants were unfree serfs, bound to their landowner's property, whereas in Ingria, a borderland province, it was difficult for landowners to bind peasants to the soil in the same way. In addition, in three parishes in north-west Estonia, there were a few thousand peasants of Swedish origin who were personally free, because they were subject to Swedish law.Footnote 21 They had their counterparts in Poland, where peasants of German origin subject to German law had maintained their personal freedom and the right to move.Footnote 22

Estonia, Livonia and Ingria had suffered heavily from plague epidemics, famine and frequent wars, so at the outset of the Swedish rule many holdings lay derelict. Large domains were enfeoffed or leased to aristocrats from Sweden, while deserter Finnish conscripts stationed in Sweden's Baltic garrisons settled illegally in derelict smallholdings in Ingria. Smallholdings lying in waste eventually attracted numerous free Finnish peasants to settle in Estonia and Ingria.Footnote 23

In Livonia in the mid-fifteenth century, corvée had been nine days per year, but by the mid-sixteenth century it was as much as six days per week for a man with a yoke of two oxen. Corvée was doubled from St George (23rd April) to St Michael (29th September); twelve corvée days per week indicated that peasants had to hire farmhands to do corvée. In late medieval Estonia, corvée had been less than ten days per year, but in the mid-sixteenth century it was also six days per week for a man with a yoke of oxen. In the seventeenth century, this was standardised as the corvée of one haken.Footnote 24 Corvée was doubled during the agricultural high season in Harrien/Harjumaa, Jerwen/Järvamaa and at some domains in Wierland/Virumaa and Wiek/Läänemaa. Free peasants were exempt from corvée, but some landowners nonetheless required them to do labour service two to six weeks per year during agricultural peak seasons. At times, Baltic-German landowners in Fellin/Viljandimaa also made use of peasants’ gratis collective village labour (talgud).Footnote 25

During Swedish rule, Courts of Appeal were established in Estonia and Livonia and peasants were given the legal right of appeal, which they did use. Furthermore, peasants were given the right to lodge complains against landowners, and they did so.Footnote 26 On the other hand, the labour service of Estonian and Livonian peasants grew heavier with the number of landowners increasing due to enfeoffments to the Swedish aristocracy. In addition, the Swedish Crown required labour duties of Livonian peasants for fortification work. The growth of corvée labour forced Estonian serf families to increase the number of able-bodied household members by hiring farm servants.Footnote 27

In Sweden's Baltic provinces, the confiscation of tax-exempt lands by the Swedish Crown (on the Reduction, see below) in the 1680s indicated a turning point. When asked, peasants in Ingria expressed satisfaction that their manor owners had been replaced by the Crown and that they would now pay tax/rent to the Crown. To their disappointment, however, the Crown leased the confiscated lands, together with tax/rent collection, to new manor owners. This provoked prolonged peasant unrests and labour-service strikes in Ingria.Footnote 28 By contrast, King Karl XI declared peasants in the confiscated Crown lands in Estonia and Livonia to be free and the Crown's representatives were sent to announce in vernacular to the peasants that they were no longer their manor owners’ serfs but subjects of the Swedish king. The emancipationFootnote 29 also included a regulation of labour service. However, improvements in peasants’ lives had barely started when they were abated by the disastrous famine of the 1690s and a new war. In the Great Northern War (1700–21), Russia conquered Estonia, Livonia and Ingria.Footnote 30 Russian authorities at first vaguely thought of keeping the administrative system built up by the Swedish, but before long the rule of noble landowners over corvée serfs was re-established. In the local folklore the memory of ‘the good Swedish time’ outlived the serfdom of the Russian era.Footnote 31

Swedish expansion towards the south brought warfare between Sweden and Denmark. Danish nobility had in the sixteenth century gained wide-ranging rights over peasants, and Danish landowners ruled over large agricultural properties that were worked by dependent peasants undertaking corvée (hoveri). The amount of hoveri was unregulated.Footnote 32 In 1658, after a war, Denmark had to cede to Sweden the Danish Skåneland east of the Danish Sound, but landowners in Skåneland managed to maintain their extensive Danish privileges even after the incorporation into Sweden.Footnote 33

Sweden's successful expansion politics and the incorporation of ‘corvée societies’ into the Swedish realm had consequences for peasants in the Swedish and Finnish countryside. The nobility was bestowed with land, riches and greater political influence, while the status, rights and political weight of peasant landholdersFootnote 34 weakened. They gradually regained their significance, as the war economy gave way to a more peaceful policy after 1720.

The Crown, manor owners and peasants

To the advantage of noble landowners, a new interpretation of landownership was adopted in sixteenth-century Sweden; eventually it was formalised by learned men knowledgeable about the Justinian Roman Law.Footnote 35 What the new interpretation indicated is a debated issue. According to Lars Herlitz, it indicated that the owner of land rent was the owner of the land. The owner of land rent was either the Crown or a member of noble, ecclesiastical or burgher order, whereas peasants could not own land rent. What they in the best case owned was the right to pay tax (skatte) to the Crown.Footnote 36 In any case, peasant landholders were no longer considered landowners. However, skatte peasants could not be evicted from their holdings if they had not accumulated tax/rent arrears. They also maintained their hereditary rights (bördsrätt). In fiscal contexts and in practice, taxes and land rent payments were mingled and became indistinguishable.Footnote 37 In the course of time, paying taxes to the Crown and maintaining hereditary rights proved decisive for peasants’ rights and status.

Only the nobility could own tax-exempt land (frälse). In attracting a labour force, owners of tax-exempt noble land enjoyed the great advantage that the exemption of taxes was extended to their frälse peasants, landbo peasant tenants and any other peasants within the radius of one generously measured Swedish mileFootnote 38 from the säteri manor house, the sätersgård. Frälse peasants and landbo peasants owed tax/rent and labour service of ‘a day's work’ (dagsverke) to the landowner. Moreover, noble landowners’ peasants and peasant tenants were largely exempt from conscriptions. From the perspective of the peasants, it was a considerable advantage to be exempted from the frequent conscriptions and dues and duties required of skatte peasants and Crown tenants.Footnote 39

In the early and mid-seventeenth century, large land areas in Sweden, including its Finnish provinces, were turned from Crown land into fiefs or other privileged tax-exempt noble land. Large numbers of skatte peasants and Crown tenants were thus turned into landbo peasants and frälse peasants who owed tax/rent to their noble landowner. A smaller group known as skatte-frälse peasants maintained their hereditary rights. In 1652, by the decision of the Swedish Riksdag (the Estates Assembly, or the Diet) the dagsverke labour service required of skatte-frälse peasants per year was limited to eighteen man-days and six days by man-with-horse; later the same was applied to skatte peasants. By contrast, labour service required of landbo and frälse peasants, that is, peasants who had lost their hereditary rights, remained unregulated by law.Footnote 40

In the Reduction introduced in 1680 during the reign of Karl XI (ruled 1660/1672–97), landed properties that had in the seventeenth century turned from Crown land into privileged tax-exempt land were confiscated by the Crown. In the short run the consequences of the Reduction appeared disadvantageous to peasants who were turned from frälse peasants into skatte peasants and Crown tenants. This was because the high bailiff, the collector of taxes to the Crown, made no concessions as regards tax/rent arrears, unlike many aristocratic landowners, unless they changed those into dagsverke labour.Footnote 41

To what extent the Reduction weakened the wealth of the Swedish landowning aristocracy is a debated issue. In any case, after the Great Northern War, facing an acute labour shortage, noble landowners managed to increase their power over peasants.Footnote 42 In the new Privileges of the Nobility of 1723,Footnote 43 landowners succeeded in copying the Danish privilege of 1547 that gave the landowner the right to make his property ‘as useful for himself as he can’. They also gave landowners the right to administer corporal punishment to their peasants and servants.Footnote 44

Labour service by free Swedish peasants

In late medieval Sweden, labour rent may not have been common. Even so, medieval decrees stated dagsverke labour service for the Church and the Crown, while fifteenth-century decrees recognised eight to twelve dagsverke days per year by landbo peasants of privileged aristocratic agricultural properties. During the reign of Gustav Vasa, agricultural dagsverke labour was introduced on Crown lands.Footnote 45

In the mid-sixteenth century, in the agricultural provinces of Småland, Västergötland, Södermanland and Uppland, many peasants of aristocratic domains were subject to dagsverke labour service, landbo peasants three to twelve days per year and torp peasant tenants three days per year. However, some aristocratic landowners required landbo peasants to perform dagsverke labour by order. Landbo peasants who lived close to a privileged säteri manor house may have been required to perform daily dagsverke labour.Footnote 46

Dagsverke labour had played a lesser role in sixteenth-century aristocratic agricultural properties in Sweden. By contrast, in the seventeenth century dagsverke labour was an important resource for noble landowners, as proved by the fact that aristocratic landowners may have changed other forms of tax/rent into dagsverke labour. In the contemporary understanding, unpaid dagsverke labour was gratis labour: because it could not be sold, it had no market price.Footnote 47

The weight of dagsverke labour rent in relation to other forms of tax/rent required of peasants – in money, in kind and goods, in transport duties and/or as a share of crops in manors practising sharecropping (hälftenbruk) – varied from one region to another and from one landed property to another. The principal form of rent may also have varied over time, from labour rent to money rent and back.Footnote 48 Moreover, dagsverke labour for manor owners was at its heaviest during the short agricultural peak season, when peasants had to cultivate the fields that would provide for their own households. Labour service was generally divided into summer and winter dagsverke days. Winter dagsverke, worth less than summer dagsverke, usually involved forestry work and transport duties. All heavy transport took place in the winter along networks of snow-covered winter roads over frozen lakes and marshes.

Although hoveri (corvée) peasants in Scania/Skåne were turned into free subjects of the Swedish king in the mid-seventeenth century, their hoveri continued until the mid-nineteenth century. Large peasant unrests related to hoveri took place from 1690 to 1708. Eventually, the average hoveri per year was increased from 83 days in 1750 to 118 in 1800 and to 314 in 1850. Moreover, Scanian landowners strove to tie their free peasants to the property by making moving away subject to the landowner's approval.Footnote 49

Influential men who owned several tax-exempt agricultural properties had at their disposal a substantial amount of dagsverke days, counted in the thousands. In the 1650s in Uppland province, an agricultural region north of Lake Malar/Mälaren, a new standard for dagsverke labour was introduced on the Bielke and De la Gardie properties. It consisted of approximately one hundred days per year and mantal,Footnote 50 which indicated, as a rule, two days per week for each frälse peasant. In addition, there were heavy transport duties and unregulated dagsverke labour. A few years later, peasants lodged complaints in the district court against their dagsverke burden. In the 1660s, the amount of frälse peasants’ unregulated ‘additional’ dagsverke was at least forty-five man-days and sixty-five days of man-with-horse. However, skatte-frälse peasants who had maintained their hereditary rights evidently managed not to do more dagsverke labour than stated by the Riksdag resolution of 1652.Footnote 51

In 1684 in the Skaraborg province, dagsverke was eighty man-days and twenty days of man-with-horse; in 1702 on another property, it was forty man-days and ten days of man-with-horse. At the Höja manor in Uppland, dagsverke was thirty man-days and ten days of man-with-horse, in addition to the threshing of twenty barrels of grain, long-distance transport of forty barrels of grain, one trip to Stockholm using one's own horse and several other duties. In the early eighteenth century in Uppland, dagsverke labour largely formed the backbone of the manorial economy; around the mid-eighteenth century, several landowners changed all other duties and forms of tax/rent into dagsverke labour. On the huge privileged property of Count Stenbock, dagsverke labour was by order. Peasants may have countered by sending adolescent boys and not fully able-bodied men to do the labour service.Footnote 52

In short, the labour service required of free Swedish peasants by noble landowners varied. But given that unregulated and unreported dagsverke was not exceptional, the amount of labour service on privileged agricultural properties may have been quite heavy, on a par with the corvée required of serfs across the Baltic Sea.

Labour service by free Finnish peasants

Many Swedish aristocrats and Baltic German officers received for their services frälse or other tax-exempt landed properties on the Finnish side of the kingdom, yet very few Swedish or Baltic-German landowners ever visited their Finnish domains. Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, whose extensive fiefs included the large Kimito/Kemiö island in the south-western Finnish archipelago where Swedish was the vernacular among peasants, visited the island once. Peasants in Kimito were heavily burdened with unregulated dagsverke and substantial transport duties. In 1620 they sent their representative to meet Oxenstierna in Stockholm to get their dagsverke burden lightened.Footnote 53 Bailiffs of absent Swedish landowners may have pressed the peasants hard, but Baltic-German landowners and their bailiffs became notorious.Footnote 54

Gertrud von Ungern, the widow of a Baltic-German officer Henrik Wrede,Footnote 55 in 1605 received enfeoffments in Elimä/Elimäki in the Finnish southern coastal province of Nyland, where Swedish was the vernacular among the peasants. Conflicts over peasant holdings and statutory labour service of dagsverke flared up in Elimä right from the beginning and continued until the late nineteenth century. Wrede's peasants lodged appeals first with King Gustav II Adolf and then Queen Christina, who imposed fines on Casper Wrede. Peasants continued to make complaints against the manor owner and the dagsverke burden, and in the end one peasant, considered the worst troublemaker, was executed. After learning about the Reduction in 1680, Fabian Wrede's peasants in Elimä immediately suspended performance of dagsverke labour for the manor. However, King Karl XI decided that the lands enfeoffed to Henrik Wrede could not be taken away from his heirs. Hence, dagsverke labour for the manor owner continued – as did the peasants’ protests.Footnote 56

In 1606, Catharina Hess von Wichdorff from Estonia, whose Baltic-German husband Capitan Hans Vegesack (Feisack) had been killed in the war, was enfeoffed with several peasant villages in eastern Nyland. They were formed into the Malmgård säteri manor, which later became the property of her second husband, Baron Ernst Creutz. Around 1630 he made a bargain with his peasants on six dagsverke days per week in summer and three days in winter; in 1645 his son reduced the summer dagsverke to five days per week. This meant that the landowner had at his disposal six to eight thousand dagsverke days per year. Four peasants who had maintained their hereditary rights refused to do dagsverke in 1673 and 1674. They appealed to Karl XI but lost the case; two peasants considered leaders suffered one month's imprisonment with only bread and water, a severe penalty. After the Reduction the four peasants were found to have been right.Footnote 57

In the Sjundeå/Siuntio parish in western Nyland, by the early 1650s more than two thirds of all peasant holdings owed tax/rent to privileged noble landowners. Dagsverke labour was the basis of the manorial economy, and therefore manor owners never remitted dagsverke, although they may have remitted other forms of tax/rent. In the Sjundby manor of Count Claes (Clas) Tott, the dagsverke per mantal was for frälse peasants two days per week during summer season (1st May to 29th September), in addition to an unknown amount of unregulated dagsverke and transport duties. In 1654 the count sold the manor to Queen Christina (in legal terms, to the Crown). She donated it to Count Gustaf Sparre, who never visited the estate and sold it in 1660 to Baron Ernst Johan Creutz, the owner of Malmgård manor. As the new owner of Sjundby, Creutz strove to purchase the hereditary rights of skatte-frälse peasants who had accumulated tax/rent arrears. In addition, he introduced summer dagsverke of nine days per week, seven days of which were by women, while other peasants within one Swedish mileFootnote 58 of the manor house had even heavier labour duties.Footnote 59

In 1772, King Gustav III (ruled 1771–92) publicly declared that he had ‘promised to rule free people (et fritt folk)’.Footnote 60 Swedish peasants in Scania/Skåne and Halland used the king's words in their efforts to get their hoveri burden lightened.Footnote 61 On the Finnish side of the kingdom, the statement was interpreted by landbo and frälse peasants in Elimä and several other manors to mean that they were now skatte peasants who would pay tax/rent to the Crown. Consequently, the peasants in the manors concerned refused to perform labour service for the manor owners or settle their taxes/rents with them. But the king sided with the manor owners and soldiers were sent to discipline insubordinate peasants. Approximately one hundred peasants were confined for several months and many were evicted from their holdings, while labour service continued.Footnote 62 By contrast, west of Elimä, a manor owner who was on conciliatory terms with his peasants could benefit from their gratis collective talkon/talkoot labour.Footnote 63

Baltic-German landowners were accustomed to unfree serfs, and in their enfeoffments on the Finnish side of the Gulf of Finland they and their bailiffs tended to treat free Finnish peasants as if they, too, were serfs. Possibly the Baltic-German Wredes of Elimä served to some extent as models for Swedish and Finnish landowners with privileged manors in Finnish provinces. Free Finnish peasants protested against being treated as serfs as much as against heavy labour service.

Labour service during the agricultural revolution and beyond

In the West European context, the agricultural revolution and the commercialisation of agriculture consisted of growth in agricultural output and the productivity of land and labour, together with a reshaping of the rural labour force.Footnote 64 In Sweden, the agricultural provinces in the south and around Stockholm and Lake Malar/Mälaren offered good incentives for agricultural growth.Footnote 65 In the sparsely populated area of Finland, located north of the 60th latitude, only dairy farming offered incentives for manors with access to larger markets.

In the Swedish and Finnish countryside, the agricultural revolution did not signal a general breakthrough of the cash economy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, agricultural wages may still have been paid partly in kind with work organised as dagsverke. For the landowners – who since the late eighteenth century had included peasant farmersFootnote 66 – the economic rationale lay in minimising the use of cash in remunerating the labour force.

In the nineteenth century, the agricultural labour force included several categories. First, there were torpare tenantsFootnote 67 and stat-torpare tenants with some land to cultivate, for which they performed dagsverke labour rent. Manors also had landbo tenants who performed dagsverke labour rent. Secondly, there were married statare farm labourers, who were subject to the Hired Labour Act.Footnote 68 Statare labourers were paid in foodstuffs and other necessities of life, a dwelling and some money. Landowners expected the wives of torpare, statare and stat-torpare labourers to perform poorly paid ‘extra’ dagsverke by order. The third group consisted of unmarried male and female farm servants, hired by the year, but they were increasingly replaced by day labourers and other short-term labour.Footnote 69 In addition, many peasant farmers made use of labour by parish paupers, young and old.Footnote 70

With its extensive resources, the large Vittskövle manor in Scania/Skåne offers an example of manor owners’ rights over land and labour in nineteenth-century Sweden. With cereal prices rising, the manor increased its arable land by evicting large numbers of peasants from their holdings. The hoveri labour service of the remaining peasants grew so heavy that they had to hire farmhands. To further increase the domain's production, more statare farm labourers were hired. Towards the end of the century, however, with the agricultural crisis and rising labour costs, the labour rent of torpare tenants again appeared profitable; in fact, dagsverke labour remained an important resource for the manor economy until the Second World War.Footnote 71

By contrast, in the Nynäs manor in the coastal eastern Södermanland province south of Stockholm, old manorial practices disintegrated in a few decades. In 1895, dagsverke labour by underlings still comprised half of the manor's land rents, and in 1925 all land rents were paid in cash. Nonetheless, wages continued to be paid partly in foodstuffs.Footnote 72

In Finland, dagsverke labour by underlings was a part of the manorial institution.Footnote 73 From the 1810s until autumn 1917, newspaper announcements about agricultural properties for sale included precise information on how many landbo tenants and/or torpare tenants the property had and how many dagsverke days they worked, with or without a horse.Footnote 74 Dagsverke labour could not be sold, but it was an economic asset to the landowner.

Nonetheless, at the Karsby manor of Tenala/Tenhola in western Nyland, in 1880–1 statare farm labourers already performed a larger share of dagsverke labour than the torpare tenants, whose number had been decimated.Footnote 75 At the Sarvlax manor in eastern Nyland, the number of landbo and torpare tenants decreased, while the labour service required of the remaining peasant tenants increased. From the late 1870s onwards, landbo tenants with large holdings had 208 dagsverke days, that is, four days per week. Torpare tenants had 146 dagsverke days, supplemented by heavy ‘extra dagsverke’ of highway maintenance. The manor owner complained that the working days of his four statare farm labourers (spannmålskarlar) were worth more than the dagsverke days of the torpare tenants, because these mostly sent their ‘feeble farmhands with still feebler horses’ to perform the labour service.Footnote 76 At the nearby Malmgård manor, the number of landbo and torpare tenants fell, while in 1894 all other forms of land rent were changed into labour service. By 1900, landbo tenants’ and most torpare tenants’ dagsverke had risen to 208 days, in addition to 30 ‘extra’ dagsverke days. The manor's tenants seldom performed the labour service themselves but hired farmhands to do it.Footnote 77

In Sweden and Finland, as in most of Europe, the agricultural crisis provoked unrest. In April 1907 at the large Råbelöv manor in Scania/Skåne, day labourers started a strike for shorter workdays and the right to organise. Statare labourers did not join the strike, but in solidarity torpare tenants ceased to perform dagsverke labour. The torpare tenants who had joined the strike were evicted. At the largest manors in south-western Finland, peasant tenants, farm servants and day labourers joined in a strike in summer 1903 for shorter dagsverke days; in the peak summer season, a workday of sixteen to eighteen hours was not unusual. Across Finland, conflicts over torpare tenants’ rights led to the evictions of more than two thousand torpare tenants between 1902 and 1909. Clauses concerning tenancy contracts were reformed in Sweden in 1907 and in Finland in 1909.Footnote 78 After the Civil War of 1918, the tenant system on private lands was abolished by law in Finland.

The conditions of agricultural labour force were charted in Sweden in 1911. In addition to dwellings and some cash, statare wages per household per year consisted of 900–2,200 litres of milk, 600–1,200 kilos of grain (mostly rye), plenty of potatoes, garden peas and various necessities of life.Footnote 79 In fact, statare wages seem to have largely consisted of manors’ leftover grain and milk. In Finland the conditions of the agricultural labour force were detailed in 1919–20. In addition to dwellings and some cash, statare wages consisted of about twenty different necessities of life, chiefly foodstuffs.Footnote 80

The statare system continued at Swedish and Finnish manors up to the Second World War. Before the old order ended, its last signs were documented in the International Labour Review. In 1933 it published information on the wages of Swedish and Finnish agricultural workers, including statare farm labourers, called ‘Deputatists’ (a German term). Farm wages were still largely paid in kind. In the original Swedish report reviewed in the journal, the hours of work per day were presented as the average working hours of one dagsverke.Footnote 81

Discussion

During the Cold War, Europe was in real life and in people's mental maps divided by the Iron Curtain into ‘the West’ and ‘the East’. On the Baltic Sea, it was unsubstantial but nonetheless unsurmountable, notwithstanding the fact that the Baltic Sea can be crossed with modest vessels and limited navigational skills, and peasants had done so for centuries.Footnote 82 The short Soviet period of five decades pushed the Baltic region to the margins.Footnote 83

It seems to me that this led to a mental distancing of Western scholars from societies east of the Iron Curtain and in its wake a tendency to project onto earlier centuries the West-East division of ‘the short twentieth century’ (E. Hobsbawm). The Cold War mental map also seems to have turned the Elbe River from a means of communication into an early modern ‘iron curtain’ that separated ‘the West’ of free labour from ‘the East’ of unfree labour. Thus, it became relevant for Swedish and Finnish historians to ask whether their own societies were part of ‘the West’ in the past, despite peasants’ heavy labour service and the severe punishments the historians documented in their publications. Without their research it would not have been possible to write this article.

The Canadian historian James Mavor, who lived for some time in the Russian countryside around 1900, observed: ‘The old Russian conception of a free man was that of a man who was responsible to the State for taxes.’Footnote 84 Peasants in early modern and nineteenth-century Sweden, Finland and the Baltic provinces would have fully agreed. On both sides of the Gulf of Finland, peasants knew collective village labour during haymaking: talka/talgus/talgud/talkon/talkoot. According to Janken Myrdal, in Sweden such collective village labour was known as hoparbete. Moreover, the Baltic-German fiscal Haken had a counterpart across the sea in the Swedish fiscal mantal. Each language had its own terms for rural practices and institutions that in their basic contours would have been recognisable to peasants around the Baltic Sea.

When preparing this article, I read pre-1940 authors’ works about serfdom in the Baltic Sea region. All these authors clearly had an agenda.Footnote 85 In the present-day discussion about unfree labour in the European past, the agenda may not be equally evident but it is certainly there. Historians have long since lost the innocence of their Rankean predecessors. The present-day discussion may appear as a disinterested post-Cold War rewriting of European history, but ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ are contentious words, with a potential to imply value judgement about the relationship between peasants and lords.

Acknowledgements

The first draft for this article was presented at the Economic History Meeting, University of Stockholm, in November 2017. I am grateful to the discussant Johan Svanberg (University of Stockholm) and the session participants. The second draft was presented at Baltic Connections, University of Helsinki, in March 2019. I am grateful to the session participants and especially to Marten Seppel (University of Tartu) for his valuable comments.

References

Notes

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63 Sirén, Olle, ‘Godsdriften och godssamhället ca 1690–1950’, in Degerman, Henrik, Edgren, Torsten and Sirén, Olle, eds, Stensböle i Borgå: En herrgård under 700 år (Helsingfors, 2004), pp. 163–251 Google Scholar; on talkon, see pp. 236–8.

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67 The closest English equivalent for ‘torpare’ would be crofter (in Scotland), but the institutional framework differed.

68 The Hired Labour Acts, or Servant Acts, of 1664, 1686, 1723, 1739 and 1805 stated a labour obligation for underprivileged men and women (see also German Gesindeordnung).

69 Gadd, Den agrara revolutionen, pp. 85–92; Gadd, ‘The agricultural revolution in Sweden, 1700–1870’, 138–43, 176–9; Morell, Mats, Jordbruket i industrisamhället 1870–1945: Det svenska jordbrukets historia, band 4 (Stockholm, 2001), pp. 61–73 Google Scholar; Morell, Mats, ‘Agriculture in Industrial Society’, in Myrdal, and Morell, , eds, The Agrarian History of Sweden, pp. 165–213 Google Scholar; Utterström, Gustaf, Jordbrukets arbetare: Levnadsvillkor och arbetsliv på landsbygden från frihetstiden till mitten av 1800-talet. Första delen (Stockholm, 1957), pp. 778–876.Google Scholar

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74 See, for example, Åbo Allmänna Tidning, 24th October 1815, 18th January 1817; Åbo Tidning, 8th March, 23rd August 1899; Finlands Allmänna Tidning, 24th April 1821, 20th February 1823, 17th November 1827, 9th September 1828, 20th August 1913, 4th November 1914; Hufvudstadsbladet, 25th November 1910, 11th June 1914, 22nd August 1915, 2nd April 1916, 7th October 1917.

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82 For earlier crossings, see Zilmer, Kristel, ‘He Drowned in Holmr's Sea – His Cargo-Ship Drifted to the Sea-Bottom, Only Three Came Out Alive’: Records and Representations of Baltic Traffic in the Viking Era and the Early Middle Ages in Early Nordic Sources (Tartu, 2005).Google Scholar

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