When studying court records and arbitration proceedings for evidence of contentious labour relations some recurrent themes emerge which together form what one could call a repertoire of resistant practices, a leitmotif of the infrapolitics of servants that aimed at testing the elasticity of permissible behaviour, improving their lot or seeking retribution or justice. Foot-dragging, petty theft, insolence and flight appear as common tactics employed by servants to escape, evade, avoid, refute, resist or subvert coercion and the indignities of subordination. Some practices were ‘tactics’ employed, often intentionally antagonistic, to ‘negotiate’ the power relations between master and servant (and/or the authorities), including the status of servants within the household, their chores and duties, their relationship with other household members or the degree of autonomy they enjoyed.
1 For further discussion of power relations as the subject of negotiation, see Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). Other practices were more in line with Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’, acts of defiance that were purposefully hidden from sight.
2 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), pp. 290–303. Overall, they illustrate the inherent volatility of the master–servant relationship and its legal framework of compulsory service as well as contextualising the disregard of its assumed hierarchies, which social commentators such as Sigurður Björnsson so fervently complained of.
Negotiating the moral economy of service
The proceedings of arbitration courts include many complaints about servant misbehaviour. Yet since the law demanded the unconditional obedience of servants, the direct causes or nature of the complaints are rarely discussed in much detail. It was usually enough to establish that the insolent behaviour had taken place. Thus we find servants, both male and female, who were accused of ‘wicked words and shameless taunts’ against their masters,
3 National Archives of Iceland (hereafter NAI). Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. G. Skagaströnd. Book 1 (1812–1857), pp. 11–13. of spreading ‘innuendo’ against their masters or mistresses,
4 NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. A. Miðfjörður. Book 1 (1799–1865), pp. 181–2. of speaking ‘with less respect than that which he owes his masters’,
5 NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. G. Skagaströnd. Book 1 (1812–1857), pp. 45–6. of absconding or taking leave of work without permission and so on. Since the expressed role of arbitration commissions, established in Norway, Denmark and Iceland in the end of the eighteenth century as part of broader judicial reform within the Danish–Norwegian kingdom, was not to pass judgement but to facilitate accord between the contested parties, most cases were concluded with some sort of agreement.
6 See Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, ‘Inngangur: Sáttanefndarbækur sem sögulegar heimildir’, in Vilhelm Vilhelmssson (ed.), Sakir útkljáðar: Sáttabók Miðfjarðarumdæmis í Húnavatnssýslu 1798–1865 (Reykjavík, 2017), pp. 11–45; Eva Österberg, Malin Lennartsson and Hans Eyvind Næss, ‘Social Control Outside or Combined with the Secular Judicial Arena’, in Eva Österberg and Sølvi Sogner (eds), People Meet the Law: Control and Conflict-handling in the Courts: The Nordic Countries in the Post-Reformation and Pre-Industrial Period (Oslo, 2000), p. 245. Servants could, and often did, manipulate this process to gain some form of advantage in their dealings with their masters.
Thus in 1843 two servants in northern Iceland, a married couple, absconded, leaving their master without any servants. He had them brought before the local arbitration court for violating their service contract, where they in turn accused him of maltreatment, leading to an agreement where the servants agreed to return to their master as long as he apologised and promised to improve his conduct towards them.
7 NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. A. Miðfjörður. Book 1 (1799–1865), pp. 172–3. In 1839 a farmhand used the opportunity to abscond when his master was ill and bedridden. When brought before the arbitration court the servant explained that he had absconded because he had been poorly fed and his wages not fully paid, nor were the wages of a maidservant in the same household. He eventually agreed to return, but only until a replacement had been found. From then on he was free to seek a servant position elsewhere if he so wished.
8 NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. B. Vesturhóp. Book 1 (1801–1872), pp. 139–42. Another man had made an oral agreement in 1863 to become a servant but failed to show up at the traditional turnover date in the spring. When brought before the arbitration court a few months later he promised to fulfil the agreement and become a ‘faithful and submissive servant’ as promised only if his master agreed to pay him a certain amount of wages and to allow him to work on his own behalf during the profitable winter fishing season, conditions with which the peasant promptly agreed.
9 Ibid., pp. 236–8. For a similar case see NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVII. Skag. B. Viðvík. Book 1 (1800–1903), p. 114. It was common for peasants to send their servants to the seaside to man fishing boats during the winter season, retaining their catch and the sometimes considerable profits thereof for the household. See Loftur Guttormsson, ‘Population, Households and Fisheries in the Parish of Hvalsnes, Southwestern Iceland, 1750–1850’, Acta Borealia, 28 (2011), 142–66.The necessity of servants for the economy of peasant households combined with regular periods of labour scarcity, as well as the legal framework of arbitration, could thus be exploited by servants to improve their working conditions. Or to use analytical concepts originally developed by economist Alfred O. Hirschman but recently adapted to the historical study of desertion and runaways, strategies of ‘exit’ such as absconding from service could be seen as ways to ‘voice’ grievances from a safe distance and thus to negotiate working conditions or other aspects of the power relations of service upon return or otherwise to facilitate permanent exit.
10 Marcel van der Linden, ‘Mass Exits: Who, Why, How?’ in Matthias van Rossum and Jeannette Kamp (eds), Desertion in the Early Modern World: Comparative Perspectives (London, 2016), pp. 31–45; Leo Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss, ‘Introduction: Flight as Fight’, in Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty and Matthias van Rossum (eds), A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism 1600–1850 (Oakland, 2019), pp. 7–9. Hirschman’s original work is Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge, 1970).This was, of course, always a gamble and such strategies could fail. One example is the case of the twenty-three-year-old farmhand Stefán Þorfinnsson, who in 1849 sued his mistress for what he claimed was unlawful termination of his contract.
11 NAI, Magistrate’s office of Eyjafjarðarsýsla. GA/8–2. Judicial proceedings (1849–1851), fols 36v–38v. One day, at mealtime, Stefán had begun arguing with the farm overseer. The mistress of the household ordered Stefán to cease his arguing or leave the room. He refused and said he would not leave unless he was to leave for good. She responded that he should leave if he so wished. He then gathered his belongings and left, assuming she had fired him, and went directly to the authorities to submit his complaint. Servants who were unlawfully dismissed were entitled to receive a full years’ pay, which he must have known.
12 María Elísabet Guðsteinsdóttir, ‘Sjaldan veldur einn þá tveir deila. Ástæður og fjöldi vistarrofsmála í dóma- og sáttabókum 1800–1920’, unpublished BA thesis (University of Iceland, 2020), pp. 45, 49. During the trial it became clear from witness depositions that Stefán had in fact made plans to leave beforehand, as he was unhappy with the workload and believed he was paid unfairly, and had tried to convince other servants to elope with him. Stefán also accused the overseer of having beaten him over the head, which the latter vehemently denied. Once the contrasting testimonies of who said what to whom began to emerge Stefán withdrew his complaint and the case disappears from court records. In the census of 1850 Stefán was still listed as a farmhand at the same farm (named
Friðriksgáfa), suggesting that he had stayed on as a servant after all.
13 See online census database www.manntal.is.While his attempt to voice his grievances in order to facilitate an exit from this particular service ultimately failed, Stefán’s case still attests to the agency of servants and the ways in which the conditions of labour were contested and negotiated on the basis of perceived rights and duties according to labour laws. This is evident in his insistence that the overseer had beaten him over the head. The decree on domestic discipline from 1746 allowed masters (or their surrogates, such as overseers) to physically discipline unruly servants but explicitly forbade blows to the head, thus categorising such blows as abuse.
14 Sigurðsson and Stephensen, Lovsamling for Island, II, pp. 609, 613. On the early modern understanding of the difference between the legitimate disciplinary role of restrained violence and unrestrained violence as disorderly abuse, see Susan D. Amussen, ‘Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 12–18. The overseer in turn vehemently denied the blow to the head, despite freely admitting to hitting Stefán for dragging his feet during the hay harvest, indicating that both were keenly aware of the subtle difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence within labour relations.
15 For similar disputes between servants and their masters on whether or not particular punishments classified as abuse, see Østhus, ‘Contested Authority’, pp. 267–77. A study on the termination of service contracts in nineteenth-century Iceland also shows that servants and masters were acutely aware of how communication could be manipulated in this manner and would use similarly opaque language as Stefán and his mistress when voicing grievances in order to secure their position were they to bring the matter to court.
16 Guðsteinsdóttir, ‘Sjaldan veldur einn’, pp. 48–50.Judicial sources rarely provide direct evidence of how servants perceived their rights. An interesting exception is a maidservant who sued her master in 1868 after being dismissed from service for ‘behaving intolerably’. She proclaimed to the court that she believed ‘servants were not required to obey their masters unless their orders were kindly given’.
17 NAI, Magistrate’s office of Eyjafjarðarsýsla. GA/10–2. Judicial proceedings (1865–1875), fols 93r–93v. Though servants were rarely so outspoken about their perception of their legal rights in court, some common themes indicate several reasons that were perceived as being valid excuses for disrupting the everyday social order. Servants commonly refer, for example, to the bad temper of masters or undefined ‘ill treatment’ when asked to explain why they absconded.
18 NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVIII. Eyj. A. Siglufjörður. Book 1 (1808–1874), fol. 6r; NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. A. Miðfjörður. Book 1 (1799–1865), pp. 172–3; NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVII. Skag. B. Viðvík. Book 1 (1800–1903), pp. 53–4; NAI, Magistrate’s office in Eyjafjarðarsýsla. GA/7–1. Judicial proceedings (1838–1842), fols 134v–135r; NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–1. Judicial proceedings (1830–1835), p. 124; NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–2. Judicial proceedings (1835–1837), p. 521; Guðsteinsdóttir, ‘Sjaldan veldur einn’, pp. 41–4. In nineteenth-century Sweden cruelty and abuse by masters was also deemed a legitimate reason, recognized by the courts, for servants to abscond. See Carolina 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. 178. Similar provisions can be found in servant laws in Flanders in the sixteenth century. See Thijs Lambrecht, ‘The Institution of Service in Rural Flanders in the Sixteenth Century: A Regional Perspective’, in Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe, p. 51. Unpaid wages, poor or lacking provisions of food and clothing or other breaches of the legally required obligations of masters were also common reasons servants gave for absconding or otherwise rescinding contractual obligations.
19 NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Húnavatnssýsla A. Miðfjörður. Book 1 (1799–1865), pp. 109, 223; NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. B. Vesturhóp. Book 1 (1801–1872), pp. 64–6, 118–20, 139–42; NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI: Hún. F. Engihlíð. Book 1 (1799–1890), pp. 135, 170–1, 207–9; Dalvík Regional Archive (Hsk.Svarf), H-1/40. Arbitration proceedings from Svarfaðardalur (1799–1902), pp. 11, 49–50; Már Jónsson (ed.), Bréf Jóns Thoroddsens (Reykjavík, 2016), pp. 282–3. Other sources, such as autobiographies of people who had spent their youth as servants, also describe how servants would sometimes abscond if they felt they were insufficiently fed or otherwise treated poorly.
20 Hallgrímsdóttir, A Tale of a Fool? pp. 59ff.; Benjamín Sigvaldason, Brautryðjandinn. Þættir úr æfisögu Jóhannesar Oddssonar, verkamanns á Seyðisfirði (Akureyri, 1938), pp. 19–20; Elínborg Lárusdóttir, Frá liðnum árum: Endurminningar Jóns Eiríkssonar frá Högnastöðum (Reykjavík, 1941), pp. 102–12. The commonality of such complaints suggests not only that many servants were aware of their legal rights but also that master–servant relations were perceived, by some servants at least, as a particular moral economy where servants expected a degree of reciprocity and implicitly demanded that the paternalist obligations of masters should be observed.
21 ‘Moral economy’ tends to be a muddled concept. I use it here in the manner of E. P. Thompson and James C. Scott, referring to ideas and values attached to economic relationships that have developed over time through traditions of reciprocal obligations and are maintained and reproduced through practices of negotiation and claim-staking. See E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy Revisited’, in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 259–351, particularly pp. 341–50; James G. Carrier, ‘Moral Economy: What’s in a Name’, Anthropological Theory, 18 (2018), 18–35.Labour regulations, it must be remembered, not only coerced workers into submission but also guaranteed them certain rights. These included provisions that masters should feed and clothe their servants ‘according to … tradition’, pay their wages on time and in full and refrain from verbally (or physically) abusing them.
22 Sigurðsson and Stephensen, Lovsamling for Island, II, pp. 614–15. Regulations stipulated the amount of labour the average worker should perform as well as the rations of food and number of clothing items servants should receive.
23 Guðmundur Jónsson, ‘Changes in Food Consumption in Iceland, 1770–1940’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 46 (1998), 24–41, particularly 25–7. There were some regional variations in the provision of food and clothing for servants and such provisions were also dependent upon the state of the economy at any given time.
24 Jónsson, Vinnuhjú, pp. 31–2. Some servants were nonetheless adamant in demanding their traditional provisions. That was the case with Halldór Þorkelsson, for example, who brought his master to arbitration court in 1810, during a particularly dire period in Icelandic economic history, because his master had provided him with less butter (a traditional currency in preindustrial Iceland) than he was due.
25 NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVII. Skag. B. Viðvík. Book 1 (1800–1903), pp. 53–4. The cases discussed in this study suggest that this ‘moral economy’ of service was maintained through the practices of servants who were conscious of their rights and had the means to employ these tactics of contestation and negotiation.
Such tactics were not available to all, however, and absconding from service was also not always a tactic of negotiation or a way to voice grievances. Compulsory service remained a highly coercive regime of asymmetrical power relations that put a great deal of power and authority into the hands of masters and state officials. Some absconding servants were fleeing starvation
26 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Eyjafjarðarsýsla. GA/3–4. Judicial proceedings (1809–1813), fols 162v–164v. or violent abuse,
27 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–1. Judicial proceedings (1830–1835), pp. 225–30. sometimes gaining a permanent exit from abusive situations, like a maidservant on the run from her master who was found by the local parish priest in 1812 half-starved, beaten and exhausted. He brought the master to arbitration court, where they came to an agreement that freed the servant from her abusive master.
28 NAI, Arbitration court archives XVI. Hún. B. Vesturhóp. Book 1 (1801–1872), pp. 38–9. There are many other documented cases where authority figures in local communities assist mistreated or abused servants in claiming legal restitution from their masters. See Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk, pp. 96–7. This underscores Amussen’s argument that, by doing so, they upheld the legitimacy of the patriarchal structure of authority in society. Amussen, ‘Punishment, Discipline, and Power’, 14. Others – such as a sixteen-year-old farmhand who fled the violent temper of his master (who was also his uncle) – were caught by the authorities only to be returned to their masters following a public flogging for their crime of absconding.
29 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–1. Judicial proceedings (1830–1835), pp. 225–30. Some servants left work simply to enjoy some temporary time off for their own leisure,
30 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/10–2. Judicial proceedings (1864–1869), pp. 212–16; NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–2. Judicial proceedings (1835–1837), pp. 413–16. or because they were avoiding impending punishment for some oversight, returning once the fear (or threat) of a beating had subsided.
31 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/7–2. Judicial proceedings (1827–1830), pp. 157, 410–12. As Stephanie Camp has argued in her excellent study of everyday resistance of slaves in the southern United States, such acts of ‘truancy’ served not only to (temporarily) escape violence and terror but also to ‘establish some limits to the amount and pace of their work’.
32 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 35–59. Citation from p. 40. It was a way to reclaim some degree of personal autonomy and thus served to contest the control masters had over the time and body (or labour power) of their subordinates.
Undermining authority
Other contentious practices were less openly defiant and more in line with acts of ‘everyday resistance’ as elaborated by James C. Scott and many others.
33 Scott, Weapons of the Weak is the foundational text for studies on everyday resistance. A more recent and theoretically nuanced articulation, with a good overview of the field of ‘resistance studies’, is Anna Johanson and Stellan Vinthagen, Conceptualizing ‘Everyday Resistance’: A Transdisciplinary Approach (London, 2020). Such activities were generally meant to stay hidden, but appear occasionally in court records or other sources when servants were caught or their antics were otherwise revealed. The subversive practices of shepherd Böðvar Jónsson, sentenced in 1829 to receive a flogging of twenty lashes for pilfering and absconding from service, are a case in point. He was arrested for vagrancy in 1827 at the age of eighteen and the magistrate forcibly placed him, in accordance with the stipulations of servant laws, in the service of an upstanding local farmer, where he was to be ‘weaned off laziness and other vices’, as the magistrate stated.
34 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/7–2. Judicial proceedings (1827–1830), p. 409. The disciplining that was the purpose of Böðvar’s forced service was of minimal success, however. During his trial other household members described him as insidiously lazy, noting how he would work diligently when others were looking but stop as soon as they looked away. He was especially lazy, according to them, whenever the master was away from home.
35 Ibid., pp. 419, 421. As a shepherd, his primary task was tending the livestock as it grazed on nearby fields. A maidservant reported that he repeatedly failed to herd the livestock back home for milking on time, arriving only very late in the evening, much to the ire of the maidservants, whose tasks included milking the sheep on their return from the fields.
36 Ibid., p. 421. The fact that other servants testified against Böðvar illustrates the contingent nature of the resistant practices discussed in this study, as the status of servants and their relationship to their masters could differ immensely depending on the context, even within the same household.
Many similar descriptions of insidious foot-dragging behind the backs of masters can be found in court records and other sources, describing how servants would seize any opportunity to catch some sleep, tend to their own interests, get drunk or just muck about.
37 See discussion and citations in Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk, pp. 123, 130. As servants living in peasant households that blurred any possible distinctions between work and non-work, where they were subordinate to the authority and whim of their masters within a cultural setting that venerated industriousness as virtue and perceived idleness as sin, seizing control – however temporarily – of the use of their own body, of work activities and tempos, was a way of reclaiming a sense of embodied personal autonomy.
38 For a similar analysis within a different context see Alf Lüdtke, ‘Organizational Order or Eigensinn? Workers’ Privacy and Workers’ Politics in Imperial Germany’, in Sean Wilentz (ed.), Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 311–12. It was a form of refusal of the complete control masters claimed over the body and labour power of servants and a limit to their authority. While such practices are impossible to measure with any degree of accuracy, their common occurrence was treated as general knowledge by contemporaries. Thus Jónas Jónasson (1856–1918), a priest and student of cultural history, wrote in his seminal volume on Icelandic customs and everyday life that, due to the long hours of constant labour, Icelandic servants were accustomed to ‘shirking their duties, whenever the opportunity arises’.
39 Jónas Jónasson, Íslenzkir þjóðhættir (Reykjavík, 1934), p. 3.Petty theft, or pilfering, was another resistant practice where mistreated or otherwise disgruntled servants could simultaneously (but secretly) defy the values of a social order that legitimated their subordination and improve their own immediate material conditions. A noteworthy example is the case of a maidservant in the household of the county magistrate (
sýslumaður) of Húnavatnssýsla who was sentenced in 1836 for petty theft.
40 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–2. Judicial proceedings (1835–1837), pp. 526–34. Though not all accusations could be proven, she was strongly suspected of having stolen a variety of foodstuffs (including an assortment of biscuits and cakes, treats rarely available to the common Icelander), some candles and various types of cloth.
41 Ibid., pp. 444–50. Most of these items she had delivered as gifts to her seven-year-old illegitimate son, who was living with his impoverished father in a cottage nearby. She eventually admitted to stealing a few items of food, a few pieces of cloth and some unprocessed wool, from both her current and her previous masters. She had been a servant for the magistrate prior to giving birth to her son in 1829, but had been dismissed from service once the boy was born and the scandal of illegitimacy became attached to the household.
42 Ibid., p. 390; NAI, Church archives. Undirfell. BA/2. Church register (1816–1875). The illegitimacy ratio in Iceland was high by European standards, and the majority of unwed mothers were servants. See Gísli Ágúst Gunnlaugsson, ‘“Everyone’s Been Good To Me, Especially the Dogs”: Foster-Children and Young Paupers in Nineteenth-Century Southern Iceland’, Journal of Social History, 27 (1993), 345. On legislation and popular attitudes towards illegitimacy see Sigríður Ingibjörg Ingadóttir, ‘Óegta börn’, Sagnir, 14 (1993), 54–62. A few years later she returned to work for the magistrate but was forced to leave the boy with his father. The trial proceedings betray her scorn towards her masters, as other servants describe her attempts to entice them into conspiring against the master.
43 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–2. Judicial proceedings (1835–1837), p. 394. She also defiantly proclaimed that she had stolen ‘not from necessity but from longing to steal’ and the presiding judge explicitly asked his scribe to write that she showed no signs of remorse.
44 Ibid., pp. 394, 440.Interestingly, her extensive pilfering came to the attention of her master and the authorities only when she became embroiled in a more serious case of sheep-rustling (of which she was acquitted). Such instances, where pilfering is discovered by accident or is referred to casually in unrelated cases, occur again and again in the court records.
45 For further discussion with multiple examples see Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk, pp. 141–3. It seems that it was mostly more serious cases of larceny, such as the theft of livestock, which were reported, or when servants stole from persons not belonging to the household itself.
46 For a similar analysis see Susan Howard, ‘Investigating Responses to Theft in Early Modern Wales: Communities, Thieves and the Courts’, Continuity and Change 19 (2004), p. 413. In all likelihood, pilfering was seen to belong within the boundaries of household discipline, with masters meting out punishment themselves, as they sometimes declared that they had done when the magistrate inquired.
47 See, for example, NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/7–2. Judicial proceedings (1827–1830), p. 410. Historian Sarah Maza has similarly concluded that the pilfering of domestic servants in eighteenth-century France was ‘widespread’ but rarely reported due to the exceedingly harsh punishment proscribed. See Sarah C. Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, 1983), p. 100. Pilfering was indeed viewed by many as mere youthful ignorance, a result of poor upbringing that could be corrected through discipline. Such arguments were, for example, sometimes put forward by the defence council when thieves were brought to court.
48 Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk, p. 140.Whether or not servants pilfering from their masters was a form of resistance remains an open question, as servants rarely articulated the reasoning behind their actions before the court. A few exceptions can be found, where it is explicitly stated that a case of pilfering was a response to particular grievances. Thus three young men conspired in 1811 to steal food from the pantry of the farm Torfalækur. One of the men, a day labourer living illegally at a nearby farm, had previously been a servant in Torfalækur and had somehow acquired a key to the pantry. He met the others, a troubled youngster being held prisoner at the farm while awaiting transportation to the workhouse and a twelve-year-old boy who was a foster child at the farm, in secret and gave them the keys, saying that now they would take their revenge against the ‘folks at Torfalækur’. All had reason to bear a grudge towards the household at Torfalækur, as all had suffered beatings and other mistreatment during their stay there.
49 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/5–2. Judicial proceedings (1807–1812), pp. 238–57.Regardless of whether pilfering was purposefully performed as an act of resistance or not, the fact remains that, by stealing from their masters, servants were in breach of not only the law but also what MP Pétur Pétursson called the ‘moral contract’ of the master–servant relationship.
50 Tíðindi frá alþingi Íslendinga 1861, pp. 1127–8. Their action was a violation of the submission and deference they should, by law as well as cultural expectation, show towards their master and his household order. Pilfering thus served to undermine the mirage of the orderly household as the metaphorical foundation of social order and revealed the inherent volatility of compulsory service as a labour regime, no matter what the immediate reason was for any singular act. Many other documented subversive practices by servants – purposefully hidden from sight because they knew they were transgressing the boundaries of permissible behaviour – had similar effects, such as maidservants spreading gossip and sexual innuendo about their masters
51 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Eyjafjarðarsýsla. GA/7–1. Judicial proceedings (1838–1842), fols 134v–135r; NAI, Arbitration court archives. XVI. Hún. A. Miðfjörður. Book 1 (1799–1865), p. 121. or frustrated shepherds mistreating the livestock they were entrusted with.
52 NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/5–3. Judicial proceedings (1819–1821), pp. 280–7; NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/8–2. Judicial proceedings (1835–1837), p. 389; NAI, Magistrate’s office in Húnavatnssýsla. GA/5–2. Judicial proceedings (1807–1812), p. 241. By acting counter to how they were expected to act and consciously in opposition to their masters’ interests or to the detriment of their masters’ reputation, their practices were a contentious dispute of labour relations – as defined by law and cultural norms – in one form or another, regardless of whether or not they were explicitly articulated as such, and regardless of what motivated such acts.