Compulsory service demonstrates how the state preferred young, unmarried people without a farm or a trade to work as servants. But how, then, did compulsory service connect with the policies of taxation touched on above, which taxed some servants and servant keeping, and therefore seemingly undermined the policy of encouraging as many as possible to enter service? First, taxes fell primarily on servant keeping and on servants in some and not all households. Second, those who did not enter service were taxed more heavily than those who did. In the ‘people’s tax’ of 1700 in Denmark, healthy people without a farm, cottage or position as a servant were taxed at six times the rate of a farmer’s servant.
1 Act of 31 December 1700, chapter III, § 1. In the Norwegian countryside in 1762, such people would pay eight times as much as servants if they were men, and six times as much if they were women.
2 Act of 22 December 1761, chapter II, § 3. Taxation was consequently used to make living outside service costly, while the laws on compulsory service sought to make it illegal.
The laws demonstrate that the authorities assumed that if potential servants could decide for themselves they would choose not to be servants, thus making it necessary to force them into service. Without obligatory service there would be a scarcity of servants, it was claimed. A shortage of servants hurt agricultural production, and day wage labourers were not seen as a solution to the labour supply shortage. On the contrary, day wage labour and self-employment were highly restricted for several reasons: first, it was assumed to be a life on the margins that could easily lead to vagrancy and criminality. Second, it was argued that day wage labour inflated wages. These two claims were not seen as contradictory, as it was assumed that a day labourer would rather go idle than work for low pay, thus pressuring the desperate farmer in need of extra hands to pay higher wages or leading the demanding day wage labourer to live in poverty rather than accept low wages. Third, for the young and unmarried the state considered service, in which you usually lived with your employer, as something desirable. It reflected the idea that people without a place in a household were masterless, and masterless people were unruly elements that threatened the stability and order of the state.
Besides these general concerns, there were differences within Denmark–Norway regarding who was allowed to work as a day wage labourer and would therefore be exempt from the obligation to serve. These differences reveal certain variations in how the authorities sought to structure the wage labour market. In the overarching law codes of 1683 and 1687, married people with a farm or a cottage would be allowed to perform day wage labour, as well as fishermen during wintertime and threshers, as the law put it, when they were needed.
3 DL 3-19-5 and 6 and NL 3-21-5 and 6. This, then, was the general rule for Denmark–Norway. The requirements were also similar in an act for the Danish countryside in 1791, although certain soldiers were also allowed to do day labour according to this decree. In addition, and in contrast to the earlier general law codes and the Norwegian act of 1754, married people who had ‘always supported themselves with day labour’ were allowed to continue to do so. Furthermore, the 1791 act stated that neither aliens nor the country’s own subjects should be ‘hindered’ from finding employment as day labourers in agriculture as long as they were equipped with the correct passports.
4 Act of 25 March 1791, §1.The obligatory service laid out in the 1791 act for the countryside in Denmark was more lenient than the 1754 act for the Norwegian countryside,
5 Act of 9 September 1754, §2 and 4. the act of 1777 for the Faroe Islands or the act of 1783 for Iceland. The Icelandic act was particularly harsh and repealed a previous decree allowing people with a specific quantity of wealth to work on their own.
6 Act of 3 June 1746, §15; Act of 19 February 1783, § 1. § 8 allowed fishermen to work as day wage labourers. The Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroe Island acts all also required that cottars and farmers had to send the sons and daughters they could not employ themselves to work as servants. Similar requirements do not seem to have existed in legislation for Denmark.
7 Act of 2 December 1741, part V (Aggershus region); Act 9 August 1754, § 3; Act 21 May 1777, § 11; 19 February 1783, § 7. There were some differences: Norway and Faroe Islands: sons and daughters; Iceland: only sons. Comparable obligations were, however, found in Swedish servant acts.
8 C. Uppenberg, I husbondens bröd och arbete. Kön, makt och kontrakt i det svenska tjänstefolkssystemet 1730–1860 (Gothenburg, 2018).These differences between the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway and Denmark, while not substantial, might be explained by the different demands on labour. Agriculture in the Danish part of Denmark–Norway was geared towards production for sale to a greater extent and thus the need for casual wage labour was greater than in the other European parts of Denmark–Norway. In addition, before 1800 men in rural Denmark were subject to additional mobility restrictions through the existence of adscription, which legally prohibited them from leaving the manor.
A whole alternative set of legislation restricting men’s mobility thus already existed in Denmark, making rules on compulsory service less necessary. In the late 1780s and early 1790s new liberal ideas inspired legislative changes such as the lifting of adscription. Its abolition was part of what was at the time seen as a trio of laws that promoted ‘freedom’, which also including a temporary easing of censorship and the abolition of the slave trade in 1792. The 1791 act relating to service, however, was less of a direct expression of such ideas, although some observers of life in the Danish countryside found it far too indulgent: one argued that no man or women should be able to leave the parish in which they were born before they turned twenty-eight or thirty.
9 P. A. Wedel, Hvorfor er det saa vanskeligt at holde Tienestefolk?, og hvorledes kan dette daglig voxende Onde bedst afhielpes? En Undersøgelse gieldende for alle danske Huusfædre, og især for Landmanden (Odense, 1799), p. 7.It is unclear to what degree the laws on compulsory service were followed, and it falls outside the scope of this chapter to investigate this. Most research on the practice of compulsory service has been limited to a specific county or town, but such studies have shown how the eagerness and possibility of enforcement varied over time and from place to place. At some places at certain times the laws on compulsory service were enforced, but more often enforcement was less rigorous.
10 Østhus, ‘Servants in Rural Norway’, pp. 117–18. Several of those prosecuted were merely instructed to find employment as servants, but a number of young men and women were also confined to correction houses, particularly in cases where such a workhouse could be found in the vicinity. It is, however, important to remember that for most people in Denmark–Norway service was not a permanent position, but something one did before marriage. The master–servant relationship was a contractual relationship you were allowed to exit and, despite the laws, young people worked in a variety of different situations and positions. For instance, in the northernmost part of Norway, which we will return to shortly, there was a group of young unmarried men called ‘selvfosterkarer’ who lived independently or with their parents and supported themselves by fishing and day wage labour.
11 Particular thanks to Hilde Sandvik for pointing this out.We now turn to two examples of the connection between local labour demand and servant law;
Finnmarken in the northernmost part of Norway and the Danish West Indies in the Caribbean. Despite finding different solutions, both sought to recruit labour. In
Finnmarken immigration was encouraged, in part by exempting settlers from taxation.
12 Act of 25 April 1778, § 37. Mostly reiterated in an act of 20 August 1778 § 34, with some changes. In addition, several legal measures were implemented specifically to encourage and to some extent to force servant immigration to the area. For one thing, the obligation to work as a servant was included in several decrees valid in the area, reinforcing the general laws of compulsory service.
13 Act of 25 April 1702; Act of 20 August 1778 § 34, 40 and 42. Additionally, and in contrast to the general servant legislation for rural Norway, a number of these laws applied only to men, thus revealing how it was first and foremost young male manpower that was sought after in this area. Another measure was to force people convicted of crimes to work as servants in this region. A decree from 1762, for example, directed that people from
Finnmarken sentenced to the correction house should instead work as servants for two to four years in the area.
14 Act of 8 June 1762. Their labour was seen as too valuable to confine it to a correction house.
In the Danish West Indies, African slaves came to be the favoured worker after efforts to recruit voluntary migrants, indentured servants and convict labour failed.
15 J. Heinsen, Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World. Convicts, Sailors and a Dissonant Empire (London, 2017). In addition, we find some workers who were labelled ‘servants’, meaning people who had entered into a contractual relationship. They were subject to the servant legislation in the Danish Law Code of 1683, which was affirmed as valid on the islands in 1734 and 1755. Slaves were also partly subject to that law, but they were defined as ‘property’ and were not covered under the sections of the law dealing with service. The Danish Law Code’s paragraphs 6-5-5 and 6-5-6, which gave mistress and masters the right to punish their servants and children, could be employed in the punishment of slaves. However, Gunvor Simonsen notes an interpretation of authority that was different to the practice of European Denmark–Norway. In the early period of colonisation, 1670–1700, Simonsen found that the state actually assumed the power to punish, thereby taking it away from the slave owner. Around 1700 there was a shift in this policy, which ended in 1733 with the issuing of an ordinance that delegated very wide powers to punish slaves to slave owners, and to all white inhabitants on the islands over slaves.
16 G. Simonsen, ‘Sovereignty, Mastery, and Law in the Danish West Indies, 1672–1733’, Itinerario, 43 (2019), 283–304. At the same time, in the European part of Denmark–Norway, the opposite trend was in motion: there the state slowly infringed on masters’ authority over their servants, for example in easing servants’ access to courts to address their grievances.
17 Østhus, ‘Contested authority’.