Detainments into the county jail for ‘vagrancy’ could result from several sets of circumstances, such as having one’s passport checked in a tavern or on a road somewhere. Detainments could be used as a strategy in disputes over settlement, labour contract fulfilment and workplace evictions. Detainees were also handed over by local courts. The county government would examine the legal protection of previously punished or tried detainees. Far from all orders to obtain legal protection involved detention. For instance, as a direct consequence of the new Vagrancy Act of 1833, the county government issued a decree aiming at a stricter control of the legal protection of resident poor on a parish level. All town councils and bailiffs were ordered to send in lists of people lacking legal protection to the county government after the yearly tax registrations, together with the opinion of the parish assembly.
1 Uppsala State Archives (hereafter ULA), Västmanland länskungörelse 1833, no. 151. Tax registers show that this was enforced: ULA, Mantalslängder Barkarö, Lundby, Dingtuna, Lillhärad, EIc:263, Länsstyrelsen i Västmanland, landskontoret. The immediate follow-up was also delegated to local authorities: town councils and parish constables. In Västerås, for example, on two consecutive days in 1838 between thirty and forty people – including at least two fourteen-year-olds – were called to the town council and ordered to find legal protection within two weeks.
2 ULA, Dombok 15 January 1838, §15, AII:86. Västerås rådhusrätt och magistrat. After 1833, the county constable in the nearby district of Tuhundra would ask the parish assemblies about masterless labouring poor in the parish and what should be done with them.
3 ULA, Brevdiarium 15 January 1834, no. 16, vol. 21, Kronofogden i Västerås fögderi. If the accused failed to obtain legal protection within a stipulated time frame, they were interrogated by the county government. The use of tax registers for control of protection was nothing new; the novelty was the creation of detailed administrative routines. An important stipulation in the law of 1833 was also linked to the yearly tax registration, which again placed the labouring poor in a position of dependence upon wealthier counterparts. In conjunction with the registrations, masterless persons who did not have legal protection and who were not approved by the parish assembly could avoid being treated as a ‘vagrant’ if they had written proof of one or more trustworthy persons acting as sureties.
4 Vagrancy Act, SFS 27:1833. The work the person performed should also be testified in writing. Each guarantor was made responsible for up to fifty rix-dollars, a considerable amount of money. There is evidence from several tax districts that such sureties were required.
5 ULA, Inkomna skrivelser, diverse borgensförbindelser, vol. 239, Kronofogden i Kungsörs fögderi; ULA, Sockenstämmoprotokoll, 16 March 1834, KI:3, Heds församling. People with no approval from the parish assembly and no guarantors could be ordered to find employment. Towns and parishes could transgress the law and order people to leave before the registrations because of alleged lack of protection.
6 ULA, Sockenstämmoprotokoll, 3 December 1837, KI:4, Heds församling. The use of compulsory service was fundamentally entwined with local settlement policies.
A medieval castle in Västerås constituted the physical heart of the county administration. Fewer than five chancellery officials received thousands of petitions, complaints, referrals and applications every year, and performed a variety of tasks including issuing passports. The jail consisted of nine arrest rooms scattered across the building, and had room for about thirty prisoners, but occasionally as many as seventy detainees could be jailed at the same time.
7 ULA, Slottspredikant Wallins skrivelse till Styrelsen över fängelser och arbetsinrättningar, 9 March 1838, AIa:127, Länsstyrelsen i Västmanland, landskontoret. In the years 1829–38, 2,895 detainments were recorded, and in addition more than 2,000 prisoners in transit passed through the castle. Of these detentions, 1,066 were recorded for ‘vagrancy’ only, including the detainments of 121 children accompanied by parents or a close relative.
8 ‘Vagrancy’ is here employed as an analytical term covering various offences and descriptions of actions or states of being (lack of legal protection, roaming, begging, ‘vagrancy’, travelling without a passport, and many more), punishable only or in practice by the use of vagrancy legislation. The neat columns of the national statistics regarding detainments for lack of legal protection or ‘vagrancy’ (or roaming) do not mirror the source it was built upon: jail records. For an elaboration and deconstruction of the statistics, see Johnsson, Vårt fredliga, pp. 123–45. There were 851 arrests in Västmanland for ‘vagrancy’ as the sole offence and another sixty-three for ‘vagrancy’ combined with some other offence.
9 The place of arrest for 215 detentions made in other counties are not discussed further here because of the difficulties in following up individuals who were transported to Västerås from other counties. On 189 occasions, detainees who had stood trial for other offences were ordered to find legal protection. Furthermore, twenty-three released prisoners from state prisons were sent to Västerås county jail, only to be deemed unprotected by the county government. Around sixty detainments concerned runaway servants.
10 ULA, Fångjournaler 1829–38, D2b:7–D2b:12, Kriminalvårdsanstalten i Västerås. As in many other places, leaving service prematurely could lead to being labelled a ‘vagrant’. The everyday state-building performed in the castle was thus heavily influenced by vagrancy policing.
Delimiting the scope to only the 851 arrests for ‘vagrancy’ made in Västmanland, some factors that shaped the extent to which detainments were used as part of local vagrancy policing can be outlined. In the countryside, only around twenty bailiffs and county constables were at the disposal of the county government. Parish constables sometimes assisted the county constables. Police capacity was much greater in towns, especially in Västerås, where one district court judge, assisted by several men, was dedicated to police work including monitoring that no persons lacking legal protection were accommodated. They patrolled the town asking people for identity papers in streets and taverns, and they could search people’s homes for alleged ‘vagrants’.
11 ULA, Instruction för Police Rådmannen i Westerås 1 January 1827, §2, EI:3, Västerås rådhusrätt och magistrat; ULA, Dombok, 10 June 1838, §2, A1:38, Västerås kämnärsrätt. Prosecutions for accommodating people who lacked legal protection or passports seem to have been more common in towns, with half of the arrests made in Västmanland occurring in a town.
12 J. Sundin, För Gud, staten och folket: Brott och rättskipning i Sverige 1600–1840 (Stockholm, 1992), pp. 216–17; Johnsson, Vårt fredliga, p. 328. Västerås stands out, with its 332 arrests representing 39 per cent of all arrests in the county.
13 In the three other towns (Arboga, Köping, Sala) a total of 107 arrests was made. Moreover, 39 per cent of all arrests in the countryside were made close to Västerås. Further away, there were more cost-efficient ways to deal with unwanted people. For example, paupers who begged outside their home parish could be transported back home without state involvement; the cost of the transport was paid by the pauper’s home parish or by withdrawing poor relief from the pauper.
14 Arkiv Digital (AD), Dödbok no 18, 14 December 1837, F:1, Sevalla församling; AD, Dödbok, 19 July 1837, Västerfärnebo församling; AD, Dödbok, 24 May 1831, F:4. Harakers församling. The years 1837 and 1838, in which the harvests were poorer than usual, accounted for 34 per cent of all arrests between 1829 and 1838. Many people were reported to be on the move in the spring of 1838.
15 ULA, KB Västmanland skrivelse till länsman Lejdström, 17 April 1838, AIa:127, Länsstyrelsen i Västmanland, landskansliet. That year, more than half of the arrests were made in the county seat.
People were arrested in various constellations. The most common detention was of a single man (c.66 per cent). Single women constituted only 10 per cent of the detainees. However, single women with children constituted the second-largest constellation after single men. Around 20 per cent of the detainees were women. In the larger sample of 1,066 detainees, age can be estimated for 60 per cent of the male detainees and 73 per cent of the female. Most were under the age of fifty (87 per cent of the men and 84 per cent of the women). On average, however, women were older than men. For men, the biggest concentration of those detained was in the age group 22–29 (27 per cent), whereas for women the biggest concentration was in the age group 30–39 (29 per cent). If they did not belong to the county, most detainees came from or moved around in middle Sweden, in counties adjacent to Västmanland, although some moved across wider areas.
The detainees can with few exceptions be described as labouring poor. Most, but far from all, did not legally belong where they were arrested. Four main categories of detainees can be outlined roughly. First, people who doubtlessly belonged where they were arrested. Some had previously been accused of a crime, others had not. Some were homeless, others not. Local elites could use vagrancy law as a policing technique to deal with people whose presence was found disturbing. Second, people who were known and settled at the place of arrest. Sometimes they were registered in the tax registers as lacking legal protection, while sometimes they had been excluded or never included in any register. There were conflicts around their settlement, and the parish, or some other actor, wanted to get rid of them. Third, there were people who were more or less always on the move. Sometimes they were registered in a parish somewhere, sometimes not. This was a heterogeneous group including peddlers of both sexes and people engaged in ambulatory crafts such as chimney sweeping. Others were on the move for long periods trying to scrape by. Fourth, arrests were also made of people outside their parish for temporary reasons, such as looking for work or being on the way to visit someone or collect something. Sometimes they had not been able to convince a county constable of the legality of their movement; sometimes they had begged.
The archives reveal many snapshots of how orders to obtain legal protection served functions other than to force people into service. On the contrary, difficulties with obtaining legal protection provided an opportunity for parishes to get rid of people. In October 1830 the wealthy landowner Carl Ridderstolpe – brother of the county governor – ordered the county constable in the parish of Rytterne to arrest a woman named Brita Stina Åkerström for lack of legal protection.
16 ULA, Fångjournal 1830 nos 328–9, D2b:7, Kriminalvårdsanstalten i Västerås; ULA, Protokoll med handlingar 31 October 1830, §1, AIIa:4, Länsstyrelsen i Västmanland, landskansliet; ULA, Intyg av barnmorskan Anna Wisel 21 November 1830, no. 36, DIII:210, Länsstyrelsen i Västmanland, landskansliet. She had been a servant of his for two years, but now Ridderstolpe wanted to have her removed. The main reason was that she was pregnant with her second child and no longer considered useful. Together with her eight-year-old daughter Maja, Åkerström was taken to the castle. On the second day of detainment, she was interrogated and subsequently released with a passport and ordered to find legal protection within two weeks. A week later, Åkerström and her daughter returned to the castle to ask whether residing as a lodger at a sexton’s house could be considered legal protection. The official said yes, but that if the sexton did not get permission to house her from the landowner – none other than Ridderstolpe himself – she should go to the parish priest for advice, and get help until she had recovered from childbirth. If the sexton had housed her without permission, he could have been prosecuted and evicted, illustrating the potential price of giving shelter. One week later, the parish priest wrote a letter to the castle insisting on Åkerström being removed and sent to a house of correction. In this case, labour regulations intertwined with settlement and poor relief practices in a way that was contrary to the interests of the state. Irrespective of the fact that caring for an infant should have made her exempt, the constable tried to arrest Åkerström one week after childbirth. The midwife intervened, but some months later, in April, he was more successful. Together with her daughters, Åkerström spent over three weeks in the county jail with a note of being ‘unprotected’ in the records, before being released. She was ordered to find legal protection within four weeks and given boat tickets to the county of Stockholm.
17 ULA, Fångjournal 1831 nos 140–2, D2b:8, Kriminalvårdsanstalten i Västerås. Åkerström had tried to comply in different ways; and, in doing so, she essentially fought a class struggle to avoid being harassed and jailed, but most importantly to get a roof over her and her children’s heads.
18 Cf. S. Rockman, ‘Class and the History of Working People in the Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic, 25 (2005), 530. Trying to comply was Brita Stina Åkerström’s way of resisting.