It should be evident, from the discussion above, that court archives and other sources detailing the everyday lives of ordinary people can serve to verify the discourse on servant misbehaviour displayed in numerous accounts, such as that by Sigurður Björnsson cited in the introduction. Master–servant relations were fraught with tension and conflict and labour legislation was a matter of contention and strife over labour conditions, servant rights and duties, authority and discipline and the autonomy and dignity of those subject to the dictates of labour laws. To what extent the cases found in court archives and arbitration proceedings can be considered representative of labour relations in preindustrial Iceland is of course open to debate. Economic historian Guðmundur Jónsson, for example, has argued that a focus on the everyday resistance of servants may ‘exaggerate the possibilities of the landless poor to manipulate the social system to their own advantage’.
1 Guðmundur Jónsson, ‘Review of Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, Sjálfstætt fólk. Vistarband og íslenskt samfélag á 19. öld’, 1700-tal: Nordic Yearbook of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (2018), 162–3. He may well be correct. The ‘dark figure of crime’ notwithstanding,
2 For discussion see Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Crime’, in Peter N. Stearns (ed.), Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000, vol. 3 (Detroit, 2001), pp. 335–9. the contentious labour relations found in court archives might well be exceptions from otherwise harmonious relations or successful socialisation. Yet, the correlation between master–servant disputes as they appear in court archives and the prevalent discourse on disorderly servants is noteworthy and may be taken as an indication of how many people experienced master–servant relations in everyday practice. By that I do not mean that subversive practices, contestation and strife of the sort described in this chapter were everyday occurrences, but rather that disputes over labour relations took place within the confines of everyday life and were shaped by its particularities and contingencies.
3 For further discussion on the complicated and ambiguous notion of ‘everyday life’ see Ben Highmore, ‘Introduction: Questioning Everyday Life’, in Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (London, 2002), pp. 1–34. The documented instances discussed in this chapter display a range of possibilities available to disgruntled servants to test the elasticity of permissible behaviour, to enforce perceived rights within the ‘moral economy of service’, to reclaim a personal sense of autonomy or simply to seek vengeance or vent frustrations. Although there are many indications that these possibilities were employed to a greater degree than previously assumed by historians, the extent of such practices are impossible to gauge as they elude any statistical analysis due to their ‘everyday’ and hidden nature. The agency of servants was, as with all other subalterns, ‘contingent and ambivalent’,
4 Gyan Prakash, ‘Introduction’, in Gyan Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, 1995), p. 15. but it was there nonetheless as servants manoeuvred within and around the coercive legislation and cultural norms that governed their lives.