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The Moral Economy of Compulsory Service: Labour Regulations in Law and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Iceland
Vilhelm Vilhelmsson
‘Were I to describe’, wrote Sigurður Björnsson, an aging farmer and former district commissioner (
hreppstjóri)
1 A hreppstjóri was an unsalaried official whose tasks included administering poor relief, assessing tax rolls and organizing various communal affairs, as well as performing several police functions. See Kristjana Kristinsdóttir, ‘Hreppstjórar og skjalasöfn þeirra: Um hreppsbækur og þróun stjórnsýslu frá átjándu öld til upphafs tuttugustu og fyrstu aldar’, Saga, 56 (2018), 122–48. in 1839, ‘the wayward self-righteousness of servants, their selfishness and sense of entitlement, their lack of loyalty, their laziness and unreliability in present times, the hairs would rise on the back of my head.’
2 Sigurður Björnsson, ‘Um hússtjórnina á Íslandi’, Búnaðarrit Suðuramtsins húss- og bústjórnarfélags, 1 (1839), 94–138, here 110ff. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. He goes on to describe how peasant households suffered as a result of what he perceived as the excessive demands of servants and their general insubordination, which, he deemed, resulted from the fact that they ‘separate their own well-being’ from that of their masters. He claimed that the root cause of this unruliness among servants was the widespread tolerance of illicit casual labour, thereby raising wage levels and spreading vice and immorality as the masterless status of casual labourers supposedly fostered antisocial behaviour and beliefs.
3 See Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, ‘Ett normalt undantag? Tillfälligt arbete i lag och praktik i 1800-talets Island’, Arbetarhistoria, 41 (2017), 35.His arguments echo a common discursive theme in public discussions on household discipline and master–servant relations in early modern Iceland, where, as a rule, servants were described as lazy, disobedient and self-serving, and masterless day labourers were portrayed as ‘a cancer’ on the public body.
4 Sigmundur Sigmundsson, ‘Til hvørs eru Kóngsbréfin um Betlara og Lausamenn, Okur og Práng?’, Margvíslegt gaman og alvara, 1 (1798), 62. Indeed, most contemporary observers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Iceland, like so many of their European counterparts in the early modern era, seem to have been obsessed with the perceived insolence and insubordination of servants and the social and moral threat of the masterless labouring poor.
5 See Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk: Vistarband og íslenskt samfélag á 19. öld (Reykjavík, 2017), pp. 92–5, 187–96 for discussion and citations. For European concerns see, for example, Hanne Østhus, ‘Contested Authority: Master and Servant in Copenhagen and Christiania 1750–1850’, unpublished PhD dissertation (European University Institute Florence, 2013), pp. 154–6; Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 143–53; Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe (Leiden, 2012), pp. 440–62; Raffaella Sarti, ‘“The Purgatory of Servants”: (In)subordination, Wages, Gender and Marital Status of Servants in England and Italy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 4 (2015), 347–72.Most Icelandic historians have either ignored such descriptions, portraying compulsory service, rather, as an effective means of social control and master–servant relations as mostly benevolent and shaped by the reciprocal interests of servants and peasants, or have acknowledged and reiterated this particular discourse only to dismiss its relevance.
6 See, for example, Gísli Ágúst Gunnlaugsson, Family and Household in Iceland 1801–1930: Studies in the Relationship Between Demographic and Socio-Economic Development, Social Legislation and Family and Household Structures (Uppsala, 1988); Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland (London, 2010); Guðmundur Jónsson, Vinnuhjú á 19. öld (Reykjavík, 1981); Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, Íslenska þjóðríkið – uppruni og endimörk (Reykjavík, 2007), pp. 65–8. But what if such descriptions were taken at face value as a more or less accurate – if somewhat exaggerated – portrayal of a common experience of master–servant relations? As German historian Alf Lüdtke has proposed, when historians are faced with such descriptions and ‘proceed by discounting their indignation’ to rather view them as evidence of everyday practices, the discourse takes on new meanings.
7 Alf Lüdtke, ‘Introduction: What is the History of Everyday Life and Who are its Practitioners’, in Alf Lüdtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995), p. 14. It can thereby reveal what James C. Scott has called the ‘infrapolitics’ of subordinate groups, the casual occurrences of ‘unobtrusive’ but insistent contestation over everyday matters that are inherent to asymmetrical power relations such as that between masters and servants.
8 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), pp. 183–201. This study explores the infrapolitics of compulsory service through an analysis of the contentious practices and interactions between servants and their masters as they appear in the archives of county magistrates and the proceedings of arbitration courts in northern Iceland in the nineteenth century. By shifting the focus from the normative prescription of labour laws to their application and contestation in everyday practice, this chapter illustrates how servants navigated and made use of labour laws in order to improve their lot, to demand their legal and customary rights, to test the elasticity of legal provisions and to resist the coercion inherent to labour regulations in preindustrial Iceland.