The historian Sølvi Sogner, who has written extensively on servants in Norway, observed how, through the sixteenth century, ‘all tax levies have special provisions for servants’.
1 Sogner, ‘The Legal Status of Servants’, p. 180. The taxes were mostly imposed to extract money for poor relief and war, but, in that century, taxes on servants were also issued to help fund various government spending schemes, such as the wedding of a princess or a king’s coronation.
2 17/18 (1539), 27/13 (1541), 38 (1544), 46 (1545), 147 (1560), 236/6 (1567), 266 (1569), 279 (1571), 323 (1574), 327 (1574), 335 (1574), 344 (1576), 476 (1582), 550 (1588), 656 (1595), 676 (1596), 729 (1600). Found in H. Winge, Lover og forordninger 1537–1605. Norsk lovstoff i sammendrag (Oslo, 1988). During the seventeenth century, taxation increased substantially in Denmark–Norway. Moreover, the tax system was reformed and many taxes transformed from provisional to permanent, trends that continued into the eighteenth century. In fact, taxes became one of the main sources of income for the crown during this period, particularly after the introduction of absolutism in 1660. Historians have even regarded these developments significant enough to warrant the use of the term ‘the fiscal state’ as shorthand to describe the period.
3 The levels and subsequent burdens of taxation have, however, been intensely debated. A particularly lively debate was that among Norwegian historians in the 1980s and 1990s, wherein it was argued that Norwegian peasants paid less tax than their Danish counterparts, particularly in the eighteenth century. Important contributors to this debate were Kåre Lunden, Stein Tveite, Knut Mykland and Øystein Rian. For a take by a Danish historian, see O. Feldbæk, Nærhed og adskillelse 1720–1814 (Oslo, 1998), p. 95. For a more recent contribution to the debate, see T. Bjerkås, ‘Et nytt blikk på befolkningen? Om 1723-matrikkelens konsekvenser og årsakene til dens fall’, Heimen, 51 (2014), 126–45.At the offset, servants, both as taxable objects and as tax-paying subjects, were on the periphery of this system. A number of different taxes existed, but as a general rule the most important were calculated based on the value of the land in the countryside. The urban population usually paid tax on their real estate, wealth and/or trade.
4 Dyrvik, Truede tvillingriker, pp. 243–4. This meant, therefore, that many people who had no land or property, servants among them, would not be taxed, at least not directly. To remedy this, a number of provisions were enacted to collect taxes from some of those who fell outside this system, and several drew servants into the tax system. The number of tax levies that in some way included servants is too copious to list here, but generally they can be categorised into three main types: the ‘consumption tax’ that included the so-called ‘family tax’ and the ‘people’s tax’; various poll taxes; and tax to extract poor relief.
5 We also find a number of taxes levied on servants, particularly urban servants, to help finance the poor: Act of 27 April 1758 (Copenhagen); Act of 9 May 1760 (towns in the region of Skiælland); Act of 28 April 1787 (the region of Skiælland).Poor relief tax was to some extent a continuation of earlier tax revenue, but by the eighteenth century it was primarily levied on some urban servants, particularly in Copenhagen.
6 Ibid. Poll tax was usually collected when the need for state finances were particularly desperate, often in connection with warfare. In the belligerent period 1678–1713, for example, servants and children over the age of ten or fifteen (depending on the specific tax levy) in the Danish countryside were taxed fifteen times.
7 C. Rafner, ‘Fæstegårdmændenes skattebyrder 1660–1802’, Fortid og nutid, 33 (1986), 90, table 1. In 1762, a poll tax was imposed on everyone over the age of twelve, servants among them. This tax law was collected in every part of the state: from 1762 in Denmark, Norway, Schleswig and Holstein and from 1765 also in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and
Finnmarken, the northernmost region of Norway.
8 Feldbæk, Danmark-Norge. Nærhed og adskillelse, p. 96. Other poll taxes were more concentrated in scope, time frame and geography: in 1711, for example, all waged servants in Norway were ordered to pay one-sixth of their salary in tax.
9 H. M. Kvalvåg, ‘Tjenerne som samfunnsgruppe 1711: En undersøkelse om tjenerhold og tjenernes lønnsnivå hos oppsitterne i det sønnenfjeldske Norge’, unpublished MA dissertation (University of Bergen, 1974), p. 1.The ‘family tax’ and ‘people tax’ were included in the tax category ‘consumption’ (
Consumtionen), an early modern VAT. ‘Consumption’ mostly meant urban consumption, but in the countryside a ‘family tax’ (
Familieskat) was imposed on members of a household, servants included. It was to be paid by public servants and certain other (usually) non-peasant groups in rural society, with varying measures of inclusion and exclusion depending on which income category they were deemed to belong to.
10 Dyrvik, Truede tvillingriker, pp. 243–5. For example: Act of 1 February 1672 (Denmark); Act of 8 November 1680 (Norway), Act of 24 January 1682 (Norway); Act of 31 December 1700 (Denmark); Act of 24 December 1760 (countryside Denmark); Act of 22 December 1761 (countryside Norway); Instruction 23 August 1777 (towns Norway); Instruction 9 November 1782 (Denmark). The so-called ‘people’s tax’ (
Folkeskat) was a tax on servants, urban and rural, with specific regulations and tax rates for town and country.
11 Ibid. Abolished in 1813. In the Danish countryside, the ‘people’s tax’ also included farmers’ servants, whereas in Norway it did not. Whether this constituted the actual taxation of Danish rural servants in contrast to servants in Norway’s countryside remains unclear.
An important question in this respect concerns who actually paid the ‘people’s tax’: the servant or the master? According to the legislation, it was the duty of the master to ensure the payment of the tax. Indeed, this was standard practice in all tax levies directed at servants, as it was with taxes that fell on other members of the household, such as wives, relatives and children. This, of course, was in line with the general ideology that saw the master as the representative of the household and all its members. In rural Denmark, in addition, manorial lords were responsible for collecting taxes from the household heads.
12 The collection of the ‘consumption tax’ was also leased out for some time. Rafner, ‘Fæstegårdmændenes skattebyrder’, 88; S. Imsen and H. Winge (eds), Norsk historisk leksikon (Oslo, 2004), ‘Konsumpsjon’; Act of 31 December 1700, chapter III, § 1. However, although revealing when it comes to power structures and ideology, this manner of tax collecting obscures any potential tax contribution from servants. A number of the tax levies on the ‘people’s tax’, poll taxes and poor relief tax did explicitly allow the master to deduct the tax from the servant’s wage.
13 Rafner, ‘Fæstegårdmændenes skattebyrder’, 88; Kvalvåg, ‘Tjenerne som samfunnsgruppe’, p. 31; Act of 9 May 1760 (towns in the region of Skiælland). Thus there was a possibility that servants in some cases did pay tax. On the other hand, a number of the tax levies also decreed that the tax was to be paid whether the servant received a wage or not.
14 Act of 31 December 1700, chapter III, § 1 (countryside Denmark); Decree of 23 August 1777, §1 (towns in Norway, servants over the age of 15); Decree 9 November 1782 (Denmark); Decree of 28 April 1787 (towns in the region of Skiælland).If we compare the tax levies of the sixteenth century with those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find some suggestive differences. Whereas the wording in the laws for the sixteenth century suggested that servants paid taxes on what they earned
aside from their wages,
15 Sogner, ‘The Legal Status of Servants’, p. 180. in the seventeenth century servants were no longer taxed on what additional income they might earn. This change was already evident in the late sixteenth-century tax codes, and mirrored changes in the servant legislation that sought to restrict the servant’s access to additional income beyond his or her wage. The state no longer wanted servants to be able to earn extra money from keeping sheep, trading, or growing flax or cereals and so on.
16 For more on this, see H. Østhus, ‘Servants in Rural Norway c. 1600–1900’, in J. Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 122–3. This also meant that they could no longer tax what became illegal activities. To a certain extent, taxation also became less gendered: while the earlier tax ordinances mostly concerned themselves with male servants, female servants were increasingly taxed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.