This study of servant law has emphasised four points: first, in Denmark–Norway between 1600 and 1800 a large number of different law codes, acts, decrees and ordinances on service and servants were issued. The quantity can partly be attributed to a general increase in law making in the Danish kingdom in this period, but it also reveals the interest the state took in this particular subject.
Secondly, it was argued that when we examine this substantial body of servant law three themes emerge: i) the extraction of taxes, ii) the relationship between master and servant, and iii) compulsory service. The state primarily sought tax revenue through the taxation of land, and the landless servant was of little interest here. Despite this, the servant was drawn into the tax system through specific tax levies that included poll taxes, the tax category of ‘consumption tax’ and poor relief. As such, the tax policy can also be connected with other aspects of the servant legislation: it assigned the task of tax collection to the master, thus emphasising that the servant was a member of a household where the master was the head. Conversely, the punishment meted out in the law for young, unmarried people of ‘the peasant estate’ who were not in service reveals how the state viewed this as an undesirable position, partly because such masterless people were assumed to live unruly lives. The master–servant relation was a contractual relationship with legal regulations on when and how to enter and exit service, but the law also compelled the servant to obey his master and mistress and obliged the master and mistress to care for their servants.
Thirdly, laws that regulated service dealt not only with servants but also with other types of worker and social group, particularly vagrants, beggars and itinerant people, but also soldiers, foster children and grown children, apprentices and, at times, even tenant farmers. These different groups were seen as connected by the lawmakers. A consistent concern was to compel young people to take steady employment as servants by criminalising those who did not and labelling them as vagrants and beggars. Another category, soldiers, were often drawn from among actual and potential servants, and the law sought to keep male servants in the countryside where they would be available for the military. Their importance is also evident from some of the tax levies, where soldier–servants were exempt from taxation.
The fourth observation of this study of servant law concerns the geography of the servant legislation. Servant law consisted of national legislation; the law codes of 1683 for Denmark and 1687 for Norway contained almost identical rules for servants and applied to most of Denmark–Norway, but servant law was also made up of regional and local decrees. In absolutist Denmark–Norway the king was the only lawmaker on paper; studies have shown how local elites sought to influence servant law, sometimes arguing for stricter policies than those preferred by the central administration in Copenhagen. In the decrees and ordinances themselves, we have seen how a specific local situation was often cited: the particular situation in the 1780s in Tranquebar warranted a specific ordinance there in 1785; in Finnmarken in northern Norway the laws compelled certain criminals to work as servants to ensure a supply of workers, and in Iceland in 1746 lawmakers saw the need for a whole ordinance devoted to the subject of ‘house discipline’. Despite these differences, however, a recurrent complaint was that there was a local, regional or national shortage of servants. The persistent solution to this persistent complaint was to seek to force a substantial segment of the population into service.