9
Exposed Lives: Compulsory Service and ‘Vagrancy’ Practices in Sweden in the 1830s
Theresa Johnsson
1 I would like to thank Erik Lindberg of Uppsala University for valuable comments during the writing of this chapter and Maria Ågren of Uppsala University for fruitful discussions and advice.From the late Middle Ages until well into the nineteenth century, compulsory service constituted a central principle for regulating labour in large parts of north-western Europe. As A. L. Beier has pointed out, compulsory service formed the link between labour law and vagrancy law; and, in many places, failure to comply could lead to being legally considered a ‘vagrant’.
2 A. L. Beier, ‘“A New Serfdom”: Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350–1800’, in A. L. Beier and P. Ocoboc (eds), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, GA, 2008), p. 35. Labour and vagrancy legislation were crucial elements of a complex system of interlocking regulations targeting the labouring poor, which included restrictive poor relief systems, bans on begging, and settlement and mobility restrictions.
3 C. Lis and H. Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe (Leiden, 2012), p. 435. The Servant Acts, combined with their legal sanctions – vagrancy laws – and other compounding laws and social practices, fixed the boundaries of ‘free labour’ and provided the elite with a means of coercion against weaker counterparts in, to borrow the words of Andy Wood, ‘a profoundly unequal, and often cruel, class structure’.
4 D. Hay and P. Craven, ‘Introduction’, in D. Hay and P. Craven (eds), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, 2004), p. 1; A. Wood, ‘Subordination, Solidarity, and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley, c.1596–1615’, Past and Present, 193 (2006), 20. The laws had many potential uses and broad, flexible scopes of application: regulating the labour markets, gearing the labouring poor’s work efforts into legally recognised employment, suppressing wages, creating societal order, enforcing work discipline, upholding the sanctity of contract and preserving unequal relations between the rich and the poor.
5 Hay and Craven, ‘Introduction’, pp. 33–5; Lis and Soly, Worthy Efforts, p. 435. As Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly have emphasised, ‘labour laws, poor laws, and criminal laws’ became increasingly intertwined from the early modern period onwards in large parts of Western Europe.
6 Lis and Soly, Worthy Efforts, p. 444. Legal sanctions were an integral part of contract enforcement, and took many forms depending on judicial doctrine and social practices over the centuries. However, there is only limited knowledge of whether and how these sanctions were practised. One explanation for this, as Beier observed as late as 2008, is that ‘the subject of compulsory service has largely been ignored’ in recent (British) social historical research.
7 Beier, ‘A New Serfdom’, p. 56; cf. J. Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 209 (2010), 9. For an exception, see J. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000).Just as compulsory service cannot be analysed without placing it into the legal and institutional framework it was part of, the enforcement of compulsory service cannot be fully understood without taking vagrancy practices into account.
8 By the nineteenth century, the concepts of legal protection and ‘vagrancy’ had ‘been united’. See A. Snare, Work, War, Prison, and Welfare: Control of the Laboring Poor in Sweden (Ann Arbor, 1977), p. 131. However, ‘vagrancy’ is another topic to which mainstream social history has long paid scant or predominantly prejudiced attention.
9 When used on their own, ‘vagrancy’ and ‘vagrants’ are, in this chapter, placed within quotation marks to signal that these terms are derogatory or judicial constructions rather than meaningful descriptions of people’s behaviour; cf. A. Winter, ‘Vagrancy as an Adaptive Strategy: The Duchy of Brabant, 1767–1776’, International Review of Social History, 49 (2004), 249–77. In his seminal study published in 1985, Beier argued for the need to move away from the narrow approach of studying the elite and their views on what they called ‘vagrancy’.
10 A. L. Beier, Masterless Men. The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985), pp. 3–4. Since then, several studies have normalised the ‘vagrant’ in history, turning the phantoms of ‘work-shy’ sturdy beggars into poor people trying to make a living, often in dire circumstances.
11 N. Rogers, ‘Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London: The Vagrancy Laws and Their Administration’, Social History, 24 (1991), 127–47; Winter, ‘Vagrancy’; P. Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006); T. Hitchcock, A. Crymble and L. Falcini, ‘Loose, Idle and Disorderly: Vagrant Removal in Late Eighteenth-Century Middlesex’, Social History, 39:4 (2014), 509–27. Anne Winter has written that ‘vagrancy’ is a penal, pejorative, vague and variable concept associated for centuries with antisocial behaviour, and that this very perspective has been retained in the historiography.
12 Winter, ‘Vagrancy’, 249–50. The treatment of the ‘vagrant’ in Swedish historiography is a case in point. Although thousands of arrests could be made each year for compulsory service and vagrancy offences in the 1800s, little attention has been paid to compulsory service and vagrancy policing.
13 Few systematic studies exist on the legal sanctions in relation to compulsory service before the 1850s. For an important analysis of the legislation and coercive measures, see Snare, Work. See also A. Montgomery, Svensk socialpolitik under 1800-talet (1951); V. Helgesson, ‘Kontroll av underklassen. Försvarslöshetsfrågan 1825–53’, in I. Hammarström (ed.), Ideologi och socialpolitik i 1800-talets Sverige (Uppsala, 1978); T. Magnusson, Det militära proletariatet: Studier kring den värvade armén, arbetsmarknadens kommersialisering och urbaniseringen i frihetstidens västsvenska samhälle (Gothenburg, 2005); Y. Svanström, Policing Public Women: The Regulation of Prostitution in Stockholm 1812–1880 (Stockholm, 2000); and T. Johnsson, Vårt fredliga samhälle: ‘Lösdriveri’ och försvarslöshet i Sverige under 1830-talet (Uppsala, 2016). Conversely, there is considerable knowledge of elite discussions on the same topics.
14 For example, G. Hammarskjöld, Om lösdrifvare och deras behandling, företrädesvis enligt svensk lag (Lund, 1866); A. O. Winroth, Om tjenstehjonsförhållandet enligt svensk rätt (Uppsala, 1878); B. Harnesk, Legofolk: Drängar, pigor och bönder i 1700- och 1800-talens Sverige (Umeå, 1990); M. Kumlien, Continuity and Contract: Historical Perspectives on the Employee’s Duty of Obedience in Swedish Labour Law (Stockholm, 2004). Legal scholars have shown great interest in the status crime of ‘vagrancy’ in Sweden as elsewhere. The labour and vagrancy laws of Sweden are also well known, and have been the subject of scholarly study since the nineteenth century. An older generation of Swedish social historians saw compulsory service as a cornerstone of labour legislation at the time, but their perspective was framed on the question of whether hard-working persons could be subject to legal sanctions, or if these mainly affected ‘work-shy’ persons who, perhaps deservingly so, were labelled ‘vagrants’.
15 G. Utterström, Jordbrukets arbetare: Levnadsvillkor och arbetsliv på landsbygden från frihetstiden till mitten av 1800-talet. Vol. 1 (Stockholm, 1957), p. 327. The ‘vagrant’ has been coupled with deviance, criminality and marginality, and with few exceptions has generally remained an outsider in Swedish historiography.
16 Cf. E. Österberg, ‘Vardagens sträva samförstånd: Bondepolitik i den svenska modellen från vasatid till frihetstid’, in G. Broberg, U. Wikander and K. Åmark (eds), Tänka, tycka, tro: Svensk historia underifrån (Stockholm, 1993), p. 144.This chapter argues for the continued need to bring ‘vagrancy’ into studies of labour law history. As mentioned, during recent years several valuable studies on ‘vagrancy’ have been published, usually with the focus on the migrating labouring poor. Following Judith Bennett, this chapter treats the uses of compulsory service and vagrancy laws as fundamental to labour legislation in general, and not limited to issues of mobility.
17 For a similar perspective see Snare, Work. Legal sanctions could also place the settled labouring poor into the legal category of ‘vagrants’.
18 Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service’, 12. The chapter deals with compulsory service and the particular institution of ‘legal protection’ (
laga försvar) in Sweden in the 1830s. From 1664 the principle of compulsory service was codified in the initial paragraph of the Servant Acts, and constituted the backbone of Swedish labour law until its abolition in 1885. Legal protection was fundamental to compulsory service, and contemporaries talked about the system of legal protection.
19 C. Livijn, Promemoria angående Sveriges försvarslöshetssystem (Stockholm, 1844). Cf. Snare, Work. The concept summarises the system’s interlocking regulations and sets the boundaries for what was considered a legally recognised occupation. Being engaged in a ‘lawful’ occupation, possessing an independent farm, having burgher’s rights, owning factories, practising craftsmanship or being employed or entering service according to the regulations for trade, manufactures and crafts or the Servant Acts gave legal protection from being exposed to prosecution for ‘vagrancy’. Innumerable and changing acts and ordinances defined the occupations or living conditions that were considered legal. The Servant Acts must thus be placed into a broader dynamic legal framework of labour legislation. The existence of a law allowing authorities to order persons to enter service or find other means of legal protection means that involuntary unemployment was not a legally recognised status. Despite its wordiness, the legislation was vague – a hallmark of vagrancy laws – giving leeway for local actors in choosing whether or not to use it.
20 A. Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law (Abingdon, 2012), p. 139; Johnsson, Vårt fredliga, p. 35. This makes it difficult to know whether compulsory service had any importance at a given place and time, such as a parish in Sweden in the 1830s.
21 Recent studies on ‘vagrancy’ in England have emphasised the local variations in definitions of ‘vagrancy’. See Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service’, 12; Eccles, Vagrancy; C. Mansell, ‘Female Service and the Village Community in South-West England, 1550–1650: The Labour Laws Reconsidered’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), p. 80.The main empirical focus of this chapter lies on a narrow but central aspect of the legal protection system: detainments in jail for ‘vagrancy’. Using evidence predominantly from c.1,000 vagrancy cases handled by the county government in Västmanland in the years 1829–38, this chapter explores how the labouring poor could experience the system of legal protection.
22 The chapter builds on parts of Johnsson, Vårt fredliga, chapters 2–3. Most vagrancy policing and, for example, bargaining between different actors in employment contract issues happened locally and has left few traces in the archives. Still, the detainments provide glimpses of how the labouring poor could experience the system of legal protection. The chapter is based on a combination of different sources, including official reports, interrogations, jail records and parish assembly minutes, which have been described elsewhere.
23 For details, see appendices 1–3 in Johnsson, Vårt fredliga.The county of Västmanland is a most likely case for the enforcement of compulsory service. Vagrancy offences, the judicial processing of individuals, fell under the jurisdiction of the county governments or, in some towns, a so-called Police Chamber. The county governor of Västmanland was the wealthy landowner Count Fredric Ludvig Ridderstolpe, who once called cottagers ‘corroding vermin’ in the Diet and was a strong proponent of compulsory service. There were many potential conflicts regarding labour supply and forms of employment in the county, and the 1830s was a decade characterised by proletarianisation, polarisation, unemployment and poverty. In this particular time and place, compulsory labour should not be understood in a limited context of forcing idle men and women to work for particular employers. It was an institution with highly varied aims and functions.
24 Cf. Lis and Soly, Worthy Efforts, p. 436. As pointed out by Annika Snare, in the 1800s, when labour was no longer considered a scarcity, the system of legal protection was driven by other motives: it was a tool for policing the labouring poor.
25 Snare, Work, p. 131.This chapter consists of four sections. The first gives an overview of the institutional framework in the 1830s, the second treats detainments on a national level, the third explores compulsory service and ‘vagrancy’ practices in Västmanland and the fourth concludes the chapter.