Although demographic and economic explanations provide important perspectives on labour legislation, laws create differing interests between the parties with their own internal logic. It has been shown here that coercive measures and compulsory service were surprisingly stable features of the servant position over a long time period, although the economic structure and work opportunities outside the servant institution changed profoundly. In the nineteenth-century Acts compulsory service became less strict and some features associated with a capitalistic labour market were introduced: freer wage setting, enhanced possibilities to end the contract and more alternatives to service. But a servant could still be violently brought back, chastised if misbehaving and unable to leave his or her position even if the master died or moved away. Only when the, sometimes contradictory, regulations are carefully unpacked, is this made clear.
Studying the labour laws from the perspective of different logics and tracing free and unfree dimensions emphasises the remarkable continuity of the Servant Acts that has not been possible to explain with demographic or economic features. Van der Linden’s model was developed for labour relations that are usually understood as unfree, if not outright slavery, indentured labour or coercive colonial practices. The model thus focuses more on the individual’s possibilities in unfree systems than on structural unfreedom. There were no visible chains in the Swedish servant institution and unfreedom was more structural than individual. Servants did not necessarily feel particularly unfree themselves, since they did what other people did and they could change employer after one year if they wished. Legal compulsion and violent measures were more of a threat than actual, day-to-day practice for most servants. But what an analysis based on this model makes clear is that the servant position was a position of last resort – any step outside the institution was a step towards being chased as a vagrant or physically forced back. The servant could not, as Steinfeld puts it, withdraw his or her labour at any point.
Although the choice of which specific master to work for was mostly free for servants, the position was surrounded by unfree – violent – dimensions. If a landless person did not go into service, he or she was subject to violence. If a servant did not work faithfully, the same was true. And, finally, if a servant left his or her position in advance, violent capture and return was a risk. A pre-industrial landless person might not have had many choices, but still this inherent lack of choices was not enough for the state, which formed the servant institution through its demand that people had legal protection – that is, a legally recognised place in a household. The principle of legal protection created the servant position as a position of last resort, and all measures for labour extraction were reinforced by the threat of being punished as a vagrant if the servant did not meet them. The one-year contract, chastisement and payment in kind kept the servant in his or her place. While the servant position should not be thought of as a prison for the young, landless population, neither should it be thought of as a labour market in which people could switch freely between different types of labour contracts. It is rewarding here to distinguish between the individual servant’s contract and the servant position or institution. While the laws distinguished between masters and servants and made them two separate entities, in practice individuals could go between the groups during their life course. The possibility of leaving the position means that coercive measures might have been easier to endure. Nevertheless, the institution of service was unfree in many respects. Without keeping both of these features in mind at the same time, it is not possible to explain the historical development of labour.
This study has raised questions about the story of contrasts between the free peasants in north-western Europe and unfree peasants in eastern Europe. A large part of the peasantry of Sweden was not free, and not only were they unfree once in the master–servant relationship, but they were also subject to compulsory service and physical compulsion. The political and economic effects of this unfreedom have yet to be studied more thoroughly and placed in their comparative perspective.