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The Servant, the Law and the State: Servant Law in Denmark–Norway, c.1600–1800
Hanne Østhus
1 I would like to thank the participants of the workshop ‘Labour Laws in Preindustrial Europe: The Coercion and Regulation of Wage Labour, c.1300–1850’ (22 May 2020), particularly Charmian Mansell, Thijs Lambrecht, Hilde Sandvik, Vilhelm Vilhelmsson and Jane Whittle, for their valuable feedback.On 11 March 1777 the servant Sibilla Christensdatter Hæg was interviewed by the chief of police in Oslo. Sibilla had complained to the police that her master, the merchant Hans Frederich Holmboe, had dismissed her illegally. According to the law, a servant in Oslo in the late eighteenth century could leave service on only two specific dates during the year,
2 Act of 3 December 1755, § 1 and 5. but Sibilla had been turned out on a different day. She therefore wanted compensation and asked to be paid maintenance for the time she had been without work as well as being awarded her full wages.
3 Regional State Archive Oslo (hereafter SAO), Oslo police, minutes of the interrogations nr. I, 11 March 1777, pp. 124–6. The police court, which ruled in the case four months later, disagreed. The dismissal was legal, according to the court, because Sibilla had violated paragraph 5 of the law, which gave masters the right to fire servants for ‘stealing, drunkenness, insubordination or similar things’.
4 Act of 3 December 1755, § 5. Specifically, the court claimed Sibilla had acted, in the words of the court, ‘defiantly’ towards her mistress and master. She was also faulted for being ‘reckless’ when minding her employer’s two children, resulting in one child falling and hitting his head and the other being found with marks on his arm from Sibilla having grabbed him.
5 SAO, Oslo police court, minutes nr. 3, 12 June 1777, pp. 703–4. Sibilla partly disputed these claims, alleging that the first child had fallen and hit his head against a chair when she was forced to put him down on the floor in order to make up his cradle.
6 SAO, Oslo police, minutes nr. 1, 11 March 1777, pp. 124–6. Yet, despite declaring the dismissal legal, the ruling was ambiguous: as she had requested, Sibilla was awarded her full wages. Furthermore, her master was fined for hiring Sibilla without checking her references, which the law stated that employers were obliged to do.
7 SAO, Oslo police, minutes nr. 3, 12 June 1777, pp. 703–4.As Sibilla’s case reveals, servants and masters in Oslo in the 1770s were subject to legislation that stipulated when and how servants could enter and exit service. The law also required that employers issued references upon termination of the contract and demanded references upon hiring. In addition, the law provided rules for how servants and masters should solve potential conflicts. The decree that regulated all these issues in Oslo in 1777 was part of a larger body of laws, acts and ordinances that regulated service within the Danish–Norwegian state in the pre-industrial period. This chapter examines this legislation.
Previous research has mostly examined servant law from a local perspective or with present nation-states as a starting point.
8 A. Faye Jacobsen, Husbondret. Rettighetskulturer i Danmark 1750–1920 (Copenhagen, 2008); S. Sogner, ‘The Legal Status of Servants in Norway from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century’, in A. Fauve-Chamoux (ed.), Domestic Service and the Formation of European Identity. Understanding the Globalization of Domestic Work, 16th to 21st Centuries (Bern, 2004), pp. 175–87; H. Østhus, ‘Contested Authority. Master and Servant in Copenhagen and Christiania, 1750–1850’, unpublished PhD dissertation (European University Insititute Florence, 2013) looks at both Denmark and Norway, but there is very little on other geographical areas of the Danish state. This also applies to much research that looks at servant legislation primarily through the study of other topics, such as poverty, or on labour laws more generally. Here, I investigate this body of law from the perspective of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Danish state. This state will be referred to as Denmark–Norway in this chapter. By taking Denmark–Norway as a starting point, I argue that we can both find connections and commonalities that go beyond today’s national borders and identify local and regional idiosyncrasies. As demonstrated in other research, local demands were often addressed in discussions on how to regulate work through servant law.
9 Such arguments are less explicit in research on servant legislation, but more so in research on poverty, which often also deals with servant legislation. S. Dyrvik, ‘Avgjerdsprosessen og aktørane bak det offentlege fattigstellet i Norge 1720–1760’, in K.-G. Andersson (ed.), Oppdaginga av fattigdomen. Sosial lovgivning i Norden på 1700-talet (Oslo, 1983), pp. 109–84; G. Á. Gunnlaugsson, ‘Fattigvården på Island under 1700-talet’, in Andersson (ed.), Oppdaginga av fattigdomen, pp. 185–215; H. Róbertsdóttir, Wool and Society. Manufacturing Policy, Economic Thought and Local Production in 18th-century Iceland (Gothenburg, 2008). By combining the perspective of the state with the perspective of a specific region or area we can see how different labour regimes and demands on labour interacted with both local and central servant legislation. The aim of this study is therefore to give a survey of the servant laws in the Danish kingdom during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries by examining common themes in the servant legislation as well as pointing out some differences between areas and over time.
Servant law affected many people: at least 10 per cent of the population in the European parts of Denmark–Norway worked as servants in the eighteenth century, and there were probably as many in the seventeenth century. Additionally, since service was primarily a position occupied by the young and unmarried, an even larger segment of the population had worked as a servant at one point in their life. This chapter is a study of legislation that affected servants, and not a survey of the implementation of that legislation. The time period, c.1600–1800, has been chosen because of the substantial number of servant laws that were issued during this period, particularly after the implementation of absolutism in 1660.