When Sibilla Christiansdatter Hæg went to court in Oslo in 1777, Denmark–Norway was a kingdom with changing borders and minor colonial claims. At the turn of the eighteenth century it included, in addition to Denmark and Norway,
1 The borders of Denmark and Norway also changed, particularly in the seventeenth century. Iceland and the Faeroe Islands in the Atlantic and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in the Holy Roman Empire, the Caribbean island of St Thomas, the small port of Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast in south-east India and the fort Fredriksborg on the West African coast, controlled through a treaty with the kingdom of Fetu. At the end of the eighteenth century, the borders had changed somewhat: in the Caribbean, the islands of St Jan and St Croix were added to form the island group of the Danish West Indies. In Africa, five new forts were built, but some were also lost. In Asia, a trade station was set up in Serampore in Bengal under the name Fredriksnagore and the Nicobar Islands were claimed for the Danish king. In Europe, there was an attempt to recolonise Greenland, and the king sought to consolidate his power in Schleswig and Holstein, although the areas retained their particular status as duchies.
One way to seek control over this varied and changing area was through legislation, including legislation over labour. After the introduction of absolutism in 1660, the impetus for common legislation increased and came to fruition in 1683, when a law code for Denmark was issued. Poul Erik Olsen has contended that, in addition to the king, the Law Code was one of very few common features connecting an otherwise disparate state.
2 P. E. Olsen, ‘Kolonirigets organisering’, in M. Bregnsbo (ed.), Danmark. En kolonimagt (Copenhagen, 2017), p. 201. Five years later, in 1687, the Danish code was followed by the Norwegian Law Code. Despite being initially prepared by a separate law commission that was meant to revise earlier national Norwegian law codes, the Norwegian Law Code copied the Danish Law of 1683 in most respects.
3 S. Dyrvik, Truede tvillingriker, 1648–1720 (Oslo, 1998), pp. 295–303. Importantly in the context of this chapter, the sections and paragraphs dealing with servants in the Danish Law of 1683 and the Norwegian Law of 1687 are almost identical: the later Norwegian law largely copied the language of the earlier Danish version.
4 The Danish Law of 1683, hereafter DL, 3-19. The Norwegian Law of 1687, hereafter NL, 3–21. One telling difference is between the hiring days: DL 3-19-9 and NL 3-21-9. Hiring days continued to change from place to place and over time.In principle all inhabitants of Danish lands should have been subject to the king’s law, although who an inhabitant was and what Danish lands were were both questioned and changing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Norwegian Law Code of 1687 was valid in Norway and the Faroe Islands. The Danish Law Code of 1683 applied everywhere else, with exceptions for Greenlanders in Greenland and Tamils in Tranquebar.
5 Olsen, ‘Kolonirigets organisering’, p. 201. In Holstein, under the Holy Roman Empire, Carolingian law applied. In Schleswig, the situation was different still. There, the medieval law of Jutland remained the valid law in general, but the Danish Law Code of 1683 was used in some areas. During the eighteenth century, however, the Danish Law Code and the law of Jutland were both increasingly replaced by Carolingian law.
6 F. Thygesen, ‘Danske Lovs indflydelse i hertugdømmet Slesvig’, in D. Tamm (ed.), Danske og Norske lov i 300 år (Copenhagen, 1983), pp. 255–87. A servant law for both Holstein and Schleswig was issued by the Danish king in 1844.In Iceland the legal situation was also somewhat different. The medieval law book
Jónsbok, which was in part modelled on a Norwegian Law Code from 1274, was never formally abandoned, but the Norwegian and Danish Law Codes partly came to replace it.
7 P. Sigurðsson, ‘Danske og Norske Lov i Island og de islandske kodifikationsplaner’, in Tamm (ed.), Danske og Norske lov i 300 år, pp. 347–66. When it came to servant legislation it was less necessary to implement those law codes because an Icelandic ordinance issued in 1685 regulated service.
8 Act of 2 April 1685. Its concurrence in time with the Danish and Norwegian Law Codes of the 1680s is interesting and, although there were differences, the Icelandic ordinance of 1685 laid out many of the same rules as the Danish and Norwegian Law Codes, most notably on hiring and firing and on the obligation to serve.
9 Particular thanks to Vilhelm Vilhelmsson for pointing this out. According to historian Hrefna Róbertsdóttir the act of 1685 was ‘a response to a request … from Copenhagen’,
10 Róbertsdóttir, Wool and Society, p. 153. but formulated by officials in Iceland. As such it shows the interaction between the central power in Copenhagen and local elites and officials in Iceland.
Another example of the contact between local and central authorities on the development of labour and servant law can be found in Norway in the 1730s. At that time, the state actively elicited feedback from local civil servants on how to deal with poverty and what was framed as a shortage of servants.
11 Dyrvik, ‘Avgjerdsprosessen og aktørane’, pp. 109–84. Some of those civil servants sought advice from the peasantry and reported back to central authorities that the peasantry wanted stricter rules on service. The district judge in an area in south-east Norway, for example, reported that the public ‘urgently asked’ that the law be changed, that regulations on service should be tightened, and that vagrants should not be permitted to live in the countryside at all.
12 The National Archive of Norway (RA), ‘Om tjenestefolk og løsgjengere’ 1733–4, pakksaker, stattholderembetet, letter to H. Eseman.In Iceland the 1685 decree was followed by a number of other decrees and acts in the late seventeenth and particularly in the eighteenth centuries, for example on obedience and order in the household, on compulsory service and on passports and mobility control.
13 Gunnlaugson, ‘Fattigvården på Island’, pp. 198–9; Róbertsdóttir, Wool and Society, pp. 157–69. Similarly, in other areas of Denmark–Norway a considerable number of decrees were issued to supplement or revise the rules given in the Law Codes of the 1680s. We can get an impression of the number by investigating two compilations of legal acts that were published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In both compilations, servants were grouped together with vagrants, a point I will return to later in this chapter when addressing laws on compulsory service. One of the compilations listed twenty-nine legal acts and decrees within the category ‘servants and vagrants’ just in the years between 1670 and 1795. That number excluded tax codes, as well as a number of acts issued for certain towns or regions and national law codes.
14 J. H. Schou, Alphabetisk Register over de Kongelige Forordninger og aabne Breve samt andre trykte Anordninger som fra Aar 1670 af ere udkomne (Copenhagen, 1795). The other compilation, listing more minor acts and ordinances from 1660 to 1800, referred to 112 decrees grouped as being legislation on ‘servants and vagrants’, but here too the list is far from complete and numerous servant laws were omitted.
15 L. Fogtman, Alphabetisk Register over de Kongelige Rescripter, Resolutioner og Collegialbreve, Aar 1660–1800. Anden Part, L–Æ (Copenhagen, 1806). Moreover, there were few overlaps between the two compilations.
The number of laws, acts, decrees and ordinances dealing with servants, then, was considerable.
16 The chapter will therefore not include all servant legislation issued within the kingdom. For overviews of servant laws see also for Denmark Faye Jacobsen, Husbondret, pp. 439ff; for Denmark and Norway Østhus, ‘Contested Authority’, pp. 359–65; for Iceland Vilhelm Vilhelmsson’s chapter in this volume. Most of them applied to a certain town or region. The particular act used and referenced in Sibilla Christensdatter Hæg’s case in Oslo in 1777, for instance, was originally issued in 1755 to apply in the city of Copenhagen but was extended to all chartered towns, Oslo among them, in the Norwegian region
Aggershuus in January 1776. In August the same year, most of this Copenhagen act also became law in Bergen.
17 Act of 7 Aug. 1776. Just extending a law wholesale was not common practice, but having a particular piece of servant legislation that applied to one or several towns or regions was not unusual. Another example relates to Tranquebar, a small port on the south-east coast of India. Here we find a decree regulating service dated 17 February 1785.
18 S. Rastén, ‘Beyond Work. The Social Lives and Relationships of Domestic Servants under Danish Rule in Early Colonial Bengal’, in N. Sinha, N. Varma and P. Jha (eds), Servants’ Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia (Hydrabad, 2019), pp. 268–9; J. S. Izquierdo Díaz, ‘The Trade in Domestic Servants (Morianer) from Tranquebar for Upper Class Danish Homes in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Itinerario, 43 (2019), 197–9. Before this, no specific Danish servant law for this area seems to have existed, although the Danish Law Code should have been in effect, except for Tamils. The act of 1785 dealt with hiring days and gave rules on when servants had to give notice in order to change employers lawfully. Such rules were needed, according to the local Danish colonial government in Tranquebar, because servants left work without prior notice, leaving their masters without help.
19 Rastén, ‘Beyond Work’, pp. 268–9. Similar sentiments were expressed repeatedly in legislation from the European part of the kingdom, but, as in this act from Tranquebar, the motivation usually referenced the local or regional context.
In addition, there existed in Denmark–Norway laws that did not take geography as their starting point but sought to regulate servant keeping among Jews.
20 Act of 12 March 1725; Act of 6 August 1734; Act of 4 July 1747; Act of 13 December 1748. Despite the number of geographically or, as in the case of Jews, religiously limited decrees, we can also identify three themes that appeared repeatedly in servant legislation in the period 1600 to 1800; the extraction of taxes, regulating the relationship between master and servant, and compulsory service. We now turn to these three subjects.