Compulsory service

Legislative attempts to limit and control mobility can be traced back to the Middle Ages, a time when Denmark and Norway were separate kingdoms. In regional laws from the twelfth century, we find early developments towards control over the mobility of segments of the population. In these laws, historians have also identified the transition from the slavery of the Viking Ages to ‘free labour’.4 T. Iversen, Trelldommen. Norsk slaveri i middelalderen (Bergen, 1997), pp. 255–70. There are older written laws for Norway than for Denmark. For Denmark, see B. Poulsen, ‘A Classical Manor in Viking Age and Early Medieval Denmark’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 90 (2012), pp. 451–65. Restrictions on mobility developed in later law codes, in which traces of the unfree labour of earlier periods largely disappeared from the legislation. In a decree from 1260 for Norway it was declared that farmers had trouble getting people to work for them because people wanted to go on trade trips instead of working the land. Similar reasoning was found in legislation up until the eighteenth century: people had to be induced with threats of legal consequences to work for farmers. In 1260 the solution was a ban on trading: persons who did not possess a specific amount of wealth were prohibited from travelling on trade trips between Easter and Michaelmas (29 September).5 ‘Haakon Haakonsens rettarbot’, 1260. These restrictions on mobility were repeated in the first nationwide Norwegian Law Code, issued in 1274.6 ‘Magnus Lagabøtes Landslov’, 1274. The Icelandic lawbook Jónsbok was largely based on this law,7 Sigurðsson, ‘Danske og Norske Lov i Island’, p. 348. and in Sweden a law code of the 1350s largely repeated these restrictions.8 P. Borenberg, Tjänstefolk. Vardagsliv i underordning. Stockholm 1600–1635 (Gothenburg, 2020), p. 142. The king behind this law, Magnus Eriksson, was the great grandson of the king behind the Norwegian law code of 1274, Magnus Lagabøte.

Despite differences between and within regions and between town and country, from the seventeenth century Denmark–Norway legislation almost everywhere mandated that those without a farm, a cottage or a profession were obligated to take work as servants.9 For example: DL 3-19-4; NL 3-21-4; 9 February 1684 (Norway, men); 2 April 1685 (Iceland); 28 July 1728 (women, Copenhagen); 2 December 1741, chapter 3, § 2 (Eastern region Norway); 3 June 1746 (Iceland); 29 April 1754 (countryside Norway); 3 December 1755, § 17 (Copenhagen and chartered towns in Aggershus region); 2 April 1762 (women, Denmark); 21 May 1777: § 9, 11 and 12 (Faroe Islands); 19 February 1783 (Iceland), 25 March 1791 (countryside Denmark). By then the medieval seasonal restrictions on travel had been replaced by year-round limitations on mobility. Movement was also structured around fixed moving days and half-year or year-long contracts for servants. In addition, issues of mobility and obligatory service became increasingly associated with vagrancy, which was criminal. By the late seventeenth century, people who were obligated to work as servants but refused were classified as vagrants.

By the eighteenth century, compulsory service as it was presented in a number of acts and decrees was aimed at forcing specific groups of the population into service and away from other types of work, particularly self-employment and day labour. An ordinance applicable to the countryside in Norway issued in 1754, for example, prescribed in quite typical language that everyone from ‘the peasant’s estate’ without a farm or a profession was obliged to enter annual service. The reason, according to that ordinance, was ‘[t]o check the scarcity of servants among the public, which apparently has arisen from the fact, that a considerable amount of people of both sexes would rather live on their own than work for the farmer’.10 Act of 9 August 1754, § 3.

Here we find ideas similar to those expressed in the medieval legislation cited above: people did not want to work as servants and laws were necessary to ensure that they did. Typically, however, the 1754 act referred to the scarcity of available labour in the Norwegian countryside at that particular time. Similar mentions of a particular situation in a particular region or area can be found in a number of other decrees as well. In an ordinance valid on the Faroe Islands from 1777 we are told that tramps and people going around begging for wool were to be blamed for a shortage of servants in the countryside and for harvest failure.11 Act of 21 May 1777, introduction. The solution was the same as in the 1754 law for Norway and other legislation from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: forcing people into service and punishing those who refused as vagrants. In an act from Iceland that removed the possibility of some people labouring by the week, issued in 1783, reference was again to a lack of people willing to work as servants. Instead the act claimed that people in Iceland hired themselves out on much shorter contracts for high wages or went tramping around the countryside selling ‘useless goods’ and renting out livestock illegally.12 Act of 19 February 1783, introduction and §1.

Some of the specificities of unwanted labour thus varied somewhat from place to place and over time: in the Faroe Islands in 1777 it was begging for wool, in Iceland in 1783 it was selling goods and renting livestock. In the act regulating service in Copenhagen from 1755 we find an urban example of unwanted economic behaviour: unmarried women were not allowed to ‘run around selling fruits and similar items’. Instead they were ordered to work as servants.13 Act of 3 December 1755, § 17.