Once a master and servant had found each other and the contract had been sealed with a small sum of money changing hands, the relations between them were heavily regulated. While the Crown restricted both masters and servants concerning entry into the relationship, the Acts distributed the power differently once the work year started, with far-reaching rights for masters and far-reaching duties for servants. Marcel van der Linden defines labour extraction as based on three components: compensation, conditional force and commitment.
1 Van der Linden, ‘Dissecting Coerced Labor’, pp. 306–10. All three were covered in the Servant Acts.
Compensation for servants was of two kinds: payment in kind and a cash wage. In kind wages were made up of lodging, food and clothes, so that a servant, if correctly treated, should have everything for his or her daily needs. Although this was of great importance and probably a major incentive for any willingness to take up the position, it cannot be said to characterise a free labour relation, on two points. Firstly, it deprived servants of the freedom of using their wages as best suited them and made it much harder to accumulate resources in order to one day find themselves another position. Secondly, although in kind wages made up a safety net, it did not set servants’ work apart from various kinds of unfree labour. Even in slavery or convict labour, workers were generally provided with food, lodging and clothes. Furthermore, not until the Servant Act of 1805 did insufficient food or lodging became a legitimate reason for servants to leave in advance, if the situation had not become better after repeated requests.
2 Servant Act 1805 art. 2 §4. Before that, it was rather the other way around. In the 1723 Act it was said that servants should be satisfied with the food and lodging that the master could provide, and anyone unfairly rejecting this who thereby discouraged others from taking up service in that household should be fined and forced to apologise in public.
3 Servant Act 1723 §10. This meaure was retained in the Act issued in 1739.
4 Servant Act 1739 art. 7 §8.Money wages, on the other hand, did set servants apart from unfree labour. In previous Swedish research Börje Harnesk argued that a money wage was a sign of subservience, and therefore servants preferred other kinds of compensation, such as the possibility to keep sheep. I have found a similar pattern regarding the desire to get compensation in the form of increased independence, but, in contrast to Harnesk’s finding regarding money wages, I argued that cash wages were part of striving for independence.
5 Harnesk, Legofolk, pp. 141–8; Uppenberg, I husbondens bröd och arbete, pp. 171–93. However, the Servant Acts created restrictions on wage payments in several ways. Masters were not allowed to pay their servants with part of the household’s produce. Already in the first Servant Act, of 1664, the clause regulating wages stated that no servant may request, and no master offer, the use of land or the profits of making and selling of beer or liquor. This was repeated and made more detailed in the following Acts. By the Act of 1805, the details were reduced while the essence was kept – wages should only be paid in cash and with clothes. In the last Servant Act, issued in 1833, wage rates were made a free agreement between the parties.
6 Servant Act 1664 §7; 1686 §7; 1723 §10; 1739 art. 5 §4; 1805 art. 5 §1; 1833 art. 5 §31.The other check on servants’ independence was maximum wage rates, in force from 1686 until 1805. Both masters offering and servants accepting wages higher than stipulated risked being fined.
7 Servant Act 1686 §7; 1723 §10; 1739 art. 5 §3. The regulations of wages and maximum wage rates deprived servants of the possibility to negotiate, but also deprived masters of the possibility to increase work extraction, and meant that the economic pressure to increase labour intensity was weak. Although it is plausible that masters and servants found many ways to negotiate in the daily running of things, the main mechanism allowed by the Acts for masters to increase labour intensity was the right to chastisement – that is, physical means rather than economic, and a feature well known from unfree labour relations.
Coercion, the second part of the scheme by van der Linden in defining unfreedom in labour extraction, was an intrinsic part of the servant contract. Chastisement – that is, corporal punishment – was addressed in the Servant Acts as an important way to make servants work and behave – and both were the responsibility of the master.
8 Servant Act 1664 §5; 1686 §5; 1723 §6; 1739 art. 7 §1; 1805 art. 2 §3; 1833 art. 2 §5. In accordance with the definition of the servant position above as more of a status than defined by its work tasks, the Servant Acts showed more interest in the behaviour of the servant than in how much or how efficiently he or she worked. This made chastisement a workable measure since, quoting van der Linden, ‘coercion can be applied to enforce discipline, but hardly as a punishment for a lack of creativity’.
9 Van der Linden, ‘Dissecting Coerced Labor’, p. 309. Creativity was not an important part of the servant institution as formulated by the Servant Acts. Servants should be ‘pious, loyal, diligent, obedient and not evade any of the duties that the master reasonably ordered’.
10 Sw: ‘Gudfruchtige, trogne, flitige och hörsamme, och icke undandraga sig alt thet arbete och sysslor, som husbonden thy skiäligen befaller och föresätter’. Quote from the Servant Act 1739 art. 7 §1, but the same wordings were part of all Acts. This list refers both to the actual working practices and to the behaviour of the servant in relation to the master, thus capturing the intertwined roles of master–servant relations. Chastisement was to be administered at the judgement of the master, and did not include any reciprocity. The servant could go to court if he or she thought that the chastisement received had overstepped the ‘legitimate’, ‘due’ and ‘moderate’ use defined in the Acts, since outright battery resulting in bleeding wounds or serious injury was not allowed; but as long as it was deemed rightful chastisement, the servant needed to receive it with submissiveness.
11 Sw: ‘skälig’, ‘tillbörlig’, ‘måttlig’, Servant Act 1664 §5; 1686 §5; 1723 §6; 1739 art. 7 §1; 1805 art. 3 §6; 1833 art. 3 §10.The Servant Acts also contained a number of coercive measures at a more detailed level. A servant could not demand to get his or her wages before the end of the work year, thus creating a lock-in effect. Moreover, servants’ behaviours were addressed: they were not allowed to use their money at the alehouse, nor could they refuse to work during certain holidays.
12 Servant Act 1723 §12; 1739 art. 7 §9–10; 1805 art. 3 §13; 1833 art. 3 §16. Neither were servants, as defined by the live-in arrangement, allowed to store their belongings at any other place than in their master’s household. The master was even ordered to arrange for the servant’s chest to be transported when contracting a new servant.
13 Servant Act 1664 §6; 1686 §8; 1723 §4; 1739 art. 6 §2; 1805 art. 3 §14, art. 8 §1; 1833 art. 3 §17, art. 8 §43. Such features had the effect of putting the servant’s whole life in the hands of the master. The year-long contract with food and lodging provided had the obvious benefit of being a safety net, but the detailed coercive features meant it was not a free labour contract.
While chastisement was a coercive measure for making servants work and behave, the main coercive feature for keeping servants in their position was the one-year contract. This was already established in the 1664 Servant Act, although at that time half a year could be accepted, a possibility that was abandoned with the generally stricter and more comprehensive Acts from 1723 onwards.
14 Servant Act 1664 §3; 1686 §3; 1723 §4; 1739 art. 6 §1; 1805 art. 7 §1; 1833 art. 8 §44. What differentiated this labour contract from others was not that the length was regulated, but rather two other features: that it was not possible for the servant to leave the contract in advance, and that the alternative to staying in the position was to be violently brought back. Masters could demand help from local authorities to bring servants back, which was done by force if necessary. If the master did not want the servant back, the servant who had left in advance lacked legal protection. It is crucial to note that, although obligatory service was no longer in place after 1833, the one-year contract was still reinforced by the threat of being violently brought back.
15 Servant Act 1664 §5; 1686 §5; 1723 §6; 1739 art. 6 §4; 1805 art. 9 §8; 1833 art. 9 §52.Generally, the message of the Servant Acts, especially during the eighteenth century, was that masters and servants needed to get along during the contracted year. Even if both parties were unhappy with the arrangement, they could not just leave each other. This means that force in the servant institution cannot be understood only as part of the relationship between master and servant. The state had goals other than labour extraction in imposing conditions that curtailed the freedoms of masters and servants; it sought to control landless subjects by delegating this responsibility to masters. When the chastisement of adult servants (males older than eighteen years and females older than sixteen years) was prohibited in 1858, this came with another change in the servant contract which is also the reason this year is the end of the period of study in this chapter. Since chastisement rather than giving notice was prescribed in cases when the master was unhappy with the servant, the abandonment of this force after 1858 was compensated with an increased right for masters to give notice.
16 Kongl. Maj:ts nådiga kungörelse, angående […] ändring af 5, 9 och 10 §§ i legostadgan 1833. 1 Oct. 1858. This points to the argument made in the introduction: that economic and physical compulsion are different ways of organising and extracting labour, speaking to different kind of logics, and that this was visible also to the actors of the time.
17 Steinfeld and Engerman, ‘Labor – Free or Coerced?’ p. 115. However, not all parts of the labour contract became subject to economic compulsion at the same time, which is why it is important to categorise the different parts of the labour relationship and follow its development over time.
Commitment, the third way to extract labour in van der Linden’s definition, was covered in the Servant Acts as well, as in the demand for diligent labour discussed above. But did servants take pride in working as servants, and therefore do their best? It is of course likely that many servants did appreciate the household members with which they lived, that they thought the food was acceptable and the work load reasonable, and therefore wanted to contribute to a well-managed production, partly for ‘the joy of working together’, as van der Linden puts it.
18 Van der Linden, ‘Dissecting Coerced Labor’, p. 309. Likewise, it is plausible that many others strongly disliked their subordinate position, thought they were unjust treated with unreasonably hard work and inferior provision, and only waited for a chance to get out of the servant position. There are signs of servants taking pride in doing a good job – and of masters being somewhat ambivalent about this. In the didactic literature from the time, the importance for masters and mistresses showing superior knowledge of the work process and never signalling the fragility of their position by asking servants for advice were strongly underlined. One recurring theme in this literature was servants taking pride in feeding the livestock of their employing household better than the livestock of neighbouring households.
19 Uppenberg, I husbondens bröd och arbete, pp. 218–23; Reinerus Broocman, En fulständig swensk hus-hålds-bok om swenska land-hushåldningen (Norrköping, 1736).The master–servant relation was not only a work relation, not only supposed to bring more arms and hands into agricultural production, but also a hierarchical household relation. Masters became masters when they employed servants, and as such their position as household heads and important figures in the local community was consolidated. Therefore, highly competent, motivated servants, who identified themselves with the household in which they were employed and took personal pride in its success, could be a threat to the master’s position.