Sweden was still rural in the 1830s, with only 10 per cent of the population living in towns.
1 Historisk statistik för Sverige, vol. 1 (Stockholm, 1969), pp. 50, 53. There was little industry aside from ironworking, and government policy had confined most trade and commerce to towns. Real wages for male agricultural day labourers were constant between 1800 and the 1820s, declining thereafter until the 1850s.
2 J. Söderberg, ‘Long-Term Trends in Real Wages of Labourers’, in R. Edvinsson, T. Jacobson and D. Waldenström (eds), Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics for Sweden: Exchange Rates, Prices and Wages, 1277–2008, vol. 1 (Stockholm, 2010), p. 464. Tommy Bengtsson has shown a relationship between class and mortality in Sweden in times of harvest failures during the first half of the nineteenth century. The landless experienced increased mortality when real wages fell.
3 T. Bengtsson, ‘Mortality and Social Class in Four Scanian Parishes, 1766–1865’, in T. Bengtsson, C. Campbell, J.Z. Lee et al., Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 163–70. Since the mid-eighteenth century Sweden had undergone a process of proletarianisation, and by the 1830s Västmanland had become one of the most proletarianised counties.
4 C. J. Gadd, Det svenska jordbrukets historia. Bd 3. Den agrara revolutionen: 1700–1870 (Stockholm, 2000), pp. 89, 228. Its county seat, Västerås, is located around 100 kilometres west of Stockholm. Measuring 6,740 square kilometres in total, Västmanland officially had 89,262 inhabitants in the year 1830, of whom 9 per cent lived in one of its four small towns. Västerås was the biggest town, with a little over than 3,000 inhabitants.
5 Historisk statistik, pp. 49, 61. The countryside was divided into seventy parishes, administrative units with far-reaching self-governance.
In 1826 county governor Ridderstolpe wrote in response to a state commission investigating the vagrancy situation in Sweden that the legislation concerning ‘vagrants’ and legal protection was so vast that even to obtain an overview entailed tedious work. Not surprisingly, Ridderstolpe did not limit himself to the Servant Acts or vagrancy laws. In his listing, Ridderstolpe included the Poor Relief and Settlement Act of 1788, laws on passports, the County Governor Instruction of 1734, taxation laws, land laws, various labour laws concerning journeymen and retired soldiers, and many more.
6 National Archives of Sweden (hereafter RA), ‘Utlåtande av KB Västmanland. Kommittén angående lösdrivare och försvarslösa år 1825’, ÄK-20. Poor relief rates in Sweden around 1830 were at an absolute minimum in a comparative European perspective, with rates per capita around 6 per cent of the level of those in England and Wales.
7 P. Lindert, ‘Poor Relief before the Welfare State: Britain versus the Continent, 1780–1880’, European Review of Economic History, 2 (1998), 113. Until the promulgation of a new national Poor Law in 1847, the parishes had great freedom to organise poor relief in any way they wanted, and so practices varied. Sometimes the only form of relief was to be allowed to beg within the parish; begging outside one’s parish of belonging had been prohibited for centuries. Men considered able-bodied and married couples with or without children could not normally expect any kind of relief.
8 E. Engberg, I fattiga omständigheter: Fattigvårdens former och understödstagare i Skellefteå socken under 1800-talet (Umeå, 2005). According to an ordinance of 1788, the parishes had the right to refuse legal settlement to masterless persons residing with others, so-called lodgers (
inhyseshjon). Lodgers often worked as day-labourers, and their legal status had been an issue for centuries.
9 The day-labourers’ rights and duties were officially introduced in the 1723 Servant Act, §11. See Kumlien, Continuity, p. 46.Many county governors looked at lodgers with the utmost suspicion, and Ridderstolpe once called ‘the lodger class’ a ‘nursery’ for ‘vagrants’.
10 RA, ‘Utlåtande’. County governors were not to intervene with the work of the judicial powers, but the policing and judicial treatment of ‘vagrants’, ‘idlers’ and beggars fell under their jurisdiction.
11 Kungl. Maj:ts nådiga förordning, huru med försvarslösa personer förhållas bör. Given den 29 juni 1833, Svensk författningssamling (SFS), 27:1833 (hereafter: Vagrancy Act). ‘Vagrancy’ was a crime of status and an administrative offence: Snare, Work, p. 129. This was a peculiar circumstance, as pointed out by contemporary observers, since the Swedish constitution of 1809 stipulated that no one’s freedom should be removed unless they had been tried in court. In 1828, the so-called Law Committee in the Diet ruled that it was incontestable that every member of society’s personal freedom should be protected, but it was equally important that everyone used their capacities to fulfil their duty to work for the benefit of the rest of society.
12 P. Eklund, Rätten i klasskampen: En studie i rättens funktioner (Stockholm, 1974), p. 210. The enforcement of already imprecise legislation thus took the shape of summary justice, which gave rise to legal uncertainty regarding, for example, the legal status of the masterless labouring poor.
13 Cf. A. L. Seip, Sosialhjelpstaten blir til: Norsk sosialpolitikk 1740–1920 (Oslo, 1984). Ridderstolpe once remarked that whether or not a lodger had legal protection depended on the mindset of the official who looked into the matter.
14 RA, ‘Utlåtande’. A clearer illustration of how the system of legal protection stood in opposition to the principle of legality is hard to find.
The reprisals for not complying with compulsory service were not elaborated in the Servant Acts. Instead, complementary legislation regulated the legal sanctions, and these were subject to considerable change during the 1800s. After some years of relaxations, the legal sanctions became stricter in 1833, when a Vagrancy Act was promulgated: the Ordinance Respecting the Treatment of Unprotected Persons (
försvarslöshetsstadgan).
15 Vagrancy Act, SFS 27:1833 This might seem a paradox during a time of rapid proletarianisation, commercialisation and declining real wages for the labouring poor, but can be understood in the light of contemporary elite discussions and fears of the ‘dangerous classes’.
16 Cf. Snare, Work, pp. 132–5. The previous relaxation had only concerned the penal provisions for men. From 1819, men could be sentenced to hard labour for not complying only if they had committed theft or had begged. Moreover, in 1824 the impressment of ‘vagrants’ into the army – only relevant for men – was abolished. In so doing, the legislation was also stripped of the ethnonym ‘Gypsies’. An ordinance of 1814 (also abolished in 1833) allowed previously unpunished women to be sentenced to a house of correction. Legal sanctions for men and women therefore differed until 1833. From 1833, it was again, as before 1819, possible to sentence men to hard labour without reference to any specific action (begging or theft).
17 For an overview of the judicial framework, see e.g. Snare, Work.The two Servant Acts in place in the nineteenth century (the acts of 1805 and 1833) prescribed compulsory service for one year (six months in Stockholm after 1833) for men and women from the age of fifteen, with no upper age limit.
18 Kongl. Maj:ts nådiga legostadga för husbönder och tjenstehjon. 15 May 1805, Årstrycket; Kongl. Maj:ts förnyade nådiga lego-stadga för husbönder och tjenstehjon. 23 Nov. 1833, SFS 43:1833 Besides having a lawful occupation based on statute, or owning an independent farm, the act of 1805 allowed legal protection to be offered for married, settled couples with a fixed abode in the countryside, where they were committed to working and made an ‘honest’ living, as well as for caregivers (not gender-specific) for infants and old or disabled parents. After 1833, caregivers were no longer exempt and the category of married couples was omitted. Instead, persons who could prove they were provided for by someone else did not have to find legal protection. Another exception was made for all who supported themselves in ‘an honest way’. However, this ‘honesty’ had to be approved by the parish assemblies. As suffrage to the parish assemblies was limited to landowners – the more property one owned, the more influence one potentially had – the state had given local elites considerable freedom to use the legislation according to local interests and needs.
19 Cf. Snare, Work, p. 161. The masterless labouring poor thus remained in a state of legal uncertainty and, with stricter legal sanctions introduced in 1833, the ‘system of legal protection was fully reinstated’.
20 Underdånigt förslag till förordning angående lösdrifveri, m.m. (Stockholm, 1882), p. 28; Montgomery, Svensk, p. 63; Kumlien, Continuity, pp. 85–8. For a different opinion, see C. Uppenberg, ‘The Servant Institution During the Swedish Agrarian Revolution: The Political Economy of Subservience’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), p. 174.