Entry into the servant institution or the servant contract was freely chosen to the extent that people could not be sold or born into the position, nor legally be hindered from leaving their employer after the contracted work year. Servants and masters were also free to find each other. In principle, a servant could not be forced to start working for a certain master, nor could a master be forced to employ a certain servant. But under the heading of laga försvar (literally legal/orderly protection, hereafter translated as legal protection), the Servant Acts shaped the servant position through compulsion. The Servant Acts implicitly assumed that the servant position would be open to anyone willing to work. The scarcity of labouring people, rather than unemployment, was deemed a problem. Thus, the Acts created the servant position as a position of last resort, and it made legal compulsion part of the forming of the contract.
In medieval times service was imposed on people lacking the means to support themselves, defined as a certain sum of money.
1 Martin Andersson, ‘Husbönderna, statsmakten och klasskampen: varför “gemene man” i Bispberg ville ha lägre löner’, Arbetarhistoria, 173–4 (2020), 50–9. When the first proper Servant Act was issued in 1664, its first paragraph stated that every man of the peasantry not being a peasant farmer or having access to land should go into service or otherwise be forced into military service. The fundamental change was that money could no longer save a man from the obligation to go into service. This means that legal compulsion was strengthened with the introduction of the Servant Act. However, women were treated differently in this first Servant Act. For them, it was enough that they could show an honest way of supporting themselves.
2 Servant Act 1664 §1. Title and date for Swedish laws (hereafter referred to as ‘Servant Act [year]’): Kongl. Maj:ts stadga och påbudh, om tienstefolck och legohjon. 30 Aug. 1664; Kongl. Maj:ts stadga och förordning, angående tienstefolck och legohjon […]. 23 Nov. 1686; Kongl. Maj:ts förnyade stadga och förordning angående tienstefolck och legohjon. 6 Aug. 1723; Kongl. Maj:ts förnyade stadga och förordning angående tienstefolck och legohjon. 21 Aug. 1739; Kongl. Maj:ts nådiga legostadga för husbönder och tjenstehjon. 15 Maj 1805; Kongl. Maj:ts förnyade nådiga lego-stadga för husbönder och tjenstehjon. 23 Nov. 1833. The same wordings for both men and women were kept in the second Servant Act, issued in 1686, but with one important addition. The Swedish Crown now saw the need to interfere not only with the freedom of its young and landless subjects but also with masters and their employment decisions in order to ensure a fair allocation of servants. This was done through the introduction of a limit to the number of male servants each master could employ. The allowed number of servants was based on the size of the farm.
3 Servant Act 1686 §1–2. For details about the distribution, see Uppenberg, I husbondens bröd och arbete, p. 269.With the two Servant Acts issued in the eighteenth century, in 1723 and 1739, obligatory service was strengthened and further details were added. In principle, the same ideas guided the Acts. It was not enough to support oneself, and the motivation expressed in the first paragraph of the Acts was that the Crown wanted to discourage people from vagrancy, indolence and being prowlers or lodgers.
4 Sw: ‘Inge Landstrykare, Lösdrifware, Lättingar eller Inhyseshion böra uti Wårt Land och Rike tålas’, Servant Act 1739 art. 1 §1. The acceptance of an honest occupation for women was abandoned with the 1723 Act and replaced with another alternative: that women who had caring responsibilities for old parents or small children were exempt from obligatory service.
5 Servant Act 1723 §1. This may have been of greater practical effect, as caring responsibilities must have been more prevalent than decent work opportunities. Nevertheless, it meant that legal restrictions on female labour converged towards those placed on men, as it forced women lacking the necessary position (as landed or as carer) into compulsory service.
In the 1723 Act, the restriction on the allowed number of servants in each household was extended to women, and the interference in the affairs of masters was dramatically sharpened, as the master’s own children were now to be counted as part of the labour force of the household.
6 Servant Act 1723 §2. There was a total threshold per household that employers could not exceed. If the total number of working people in the household exceeded this limit, the master could be accused of holding too many servants, even if some of them were his own children. Thus, these excess children did not enjoy proper legal protection and needed to find employment. This meant that the wording of the Act forced children of a certain age out of their parental home and into the household of someone else. In the following Act, issued in 1739, this was mitigated with the paragraph that one son and one daughter could be exempt from the allowed number.
7 Servant Act 1739 art. 3 §1–3. The inclusion of the master’s own children in the allowed labour force was repealed in 1747, although the general restriction on the number of servants remained in place until 1789.
8 Kongl. Maj:ts nådige förordning angående hemmans klyfning. Gifwen Stockholm i råd-cammaren then 30 junii 1747; Kongl. Maj:ts öpna nådiga försäkran och stadfästelse å swenska och finska allmogens fri- och rättigheter. Gifwen Stockholms slott then 4 April 1789.It might not be very surprising that clauses regulating masters’ behaviour were more contested and repealed earlier than those regulating servants; in general the Servant Acts ensured masters’ access to labour. But in my previous studies, in which I examined court cases, I found that masters’ behaviour was more closely monitored and more often punished by the court than the behaviour of servants. Even though a master with an especially pressing situation could be allowed to employ an extra servant, this could not be decided freely by the master but needed permission from the court. And the punishment of masters for employing servants without using them all year round was much more common in the court than cases of servants running away.
9 Uppenberg, I husbondens bröd och arbete, pp. 117–22, 134–7, 150–4; Uppenberg, ‘The Servant Institution’, pp. 176–9. However, masters were punished economically, while servants were also punished physically (for example with whipping or incarceration). This means that it is important not only to take employment relations into account but to acknowledge the legislative context and different ways that compulsion was administered.
During the nineteenth century compulsory service was becoming more contested, but it was not abandoned until the last Servant Act was issued in 1833. In the 1805 Servant Act, service was not compulsory for married people ‘who were registered and living in a certain place, pledged to honest and continuous work’.
10 Sw: ‘å Landet äro gifte samt å wisst ställe mantalsskrifne och boende, der de till arbete sig förbundit och ärligen försörja’, Servant Act 1805 art. 1 §1. However, in 1811 and 1819 new decrees were issued in order to stress that this did not mean that young, landless people should get married and just live for the day, working irregularly.
11 Kongl. Maj:ts nådiga påbud om en noga efterlednad af Kongl. Maj:ts d. 15 maji 1805 utfärdade nådiga stadga för husbönder och tjenstehjon; gifwit Drottningholms slott den 30 augusti 1811; Kongl. Maj:ts nådiga kungörelse angående flyttningstiden för tjenstehjon. Gifwen Stockholms slott den 22 april 1819. By 1833, the specific demand for landless people to choose service rather than any other way of supporting themselves was replaced by the demand to support oneself. But if that demand was not met, landless people could still be forced into the servant position.
12 Servant Act 1833 art. 1 §1. The servant position was no longer the position of last resort for landless people, although it continued to be a common position in which labour extraction was surrounded by unfree dimensions, as is developed below.
Marcel van der Linden describes two forms of coercive acts related to labour unfreedom: constrained choice and physical compulsion.
13 Van der Linden, ‘Dissecting Coerced Labor’, p. 296. But since constrained choice includes everything from free wage labour to self-sale into slavery in this model, it is not clear that the ‘constrained choice’ category is enough to capture the specificities of the servant position, or changes over time. To be subject to the Servant Acts in the first place meant to be landless, and to be a landless person in a pre-industrial setting was to be a person with constrained choices. What made the choice of the servant position special was thus not that it was constrained but that it worked as the last resort of free choice of employer. The choice not to take up the servant position led to physical compulsion.
The clauses on legal protection targeted a specific group and gave them the following options: take up service in a household of your choice that is eligible to offer legal protection; go into military service (for men); take care of elderly parents (for women); or find yourself a landed position (a constrained choice indeed). If the person did not adhere to this, he or she would be put in another group, no longer one with constrained choices but rather under compulsion (mediated without money): a group that could be physically forced, either into a household as a servant or into convict labour. The service position was defined by its lack of definition: if one did not belong to any other defined group, one had to be a servant. In this way, the servant position was the last resort of legal and acceptable occupations. On the other side were illegal and immoral ways to support oneself – vagrancy, theft, prostitution. Although obligatory service was less strict after the Act of 1805 and especially after 1833, the need to find legal protection still shaped the lives of the landless.