Peasants in Northern Europe
All over early modern Fennoscandiaâin the areas of modern-day Norway, Sweden, and Finlandâthere were peasants who occupied wealthy farmsteads, held positions of trust, and had kinship networks with members of higher status groups such as local priests and state officials, burghers, and other gentry. Even though they served as a link between the rest of the peasantry and the state authorities, it is evident that early modern peasant resistance was also often led by the wealthy. There is abundant evidence in court records that these respected and leading members of the local community could practically terrorise their neighbourhood with violence and aggression. Why was there this seeming contradiction between respectability and confrontation, and how widespread a phenomenon was this in the North?
In the English language, the very concept âpeasant eliteâ sounds contradictoryââpeasantâ is often associated with lower status and seems to have nothing to do with elites. But in the Scandinavian languages and in Finnish, the contradiction disappears. In most contexts, bonde and talonpoika (for further terminology, see the glossary) do not have the same pejorative connotations as âpeasantâ does in English. In fact, it is often the contrary; in the nationalistic histories and literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the terms were linked to contemporary, ideal images of a free, landowning peasantry. This peasantry, that had semi-autonomous administration over their local communities, was seen as the essence of the nation states of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
The early modern reality was, of course, a lot more complicated though. Unlike most European regions, medieval feudalism had not gained ground in the kingdoms of Norway and Sweden (which included what is now Finland), and it was common that peasant farmers owned the land they cultivated; yet the early modern rural population was still divided into many sub-groups with regard to the ownership of land, taxation, and other duties. 1
In early modern sources from Scandinavia, the word bonde refers to a narrower group of people than the English translation. Bonde was a fiscal, social, and even political term. It referred to a farmer who occupied a taxable land unit called a bruk, hemman, or talo, meaning âfarmsteadâ. It signifies a common person who occupied and cultivated a farm, in contrast to âlordsâ, meaning all the higher-ranking status groups, and landless rural groups, such as torpare and husmenn (crofters) or inhysningar (cottagers). 2
In the sixteenth century, the nobility did not dominate agricultural land in the North as in other parts of Europe. However, regional variations were great. Large areas in Fennoscandiaâmost parts of inland Norway, Northern Sweden and other forest regions, Central and Eastern Finland, Ostrobothnia (Ăsterbotten/Pohjanmaa), and Laplandâhad no noble dwellings at all, while in areas like Southern and Central Sweden as well as Southeastern Norway, there were a lot more. In addition, both population and production were more undifferentiated and rural than in many other European regions. 3
Finland was the most extreme contrast to most of Europe in terms of landownership. Whereas elsewhere it was more of an exception that peasants owned their land, in Finland it was generally the rule; in 1560, for instance, 94 % of farms in the Finnish part of the Swedish realm were cultivated by freeholders. 4 This contrasts sharply to the area of Denmark where, in around 1700, the share of landowning peasants was less than 1 %. 5 In what is now Sweden, about half of the land was skatte (tax), meaning that the peasant freeholders owned it and paid taxes directly to the Crown. After the Reformation in 1527, the Church lost its land to the Crown, who thereafter held 20â30 % of the land. 6 Meanwhile in Norway, the pattern of landownership was more diverse. Farms were divided into separate holdings, some of which were owned by the farmer, some by others so that the percentage of land owned by peasants was about one third of the total, and only part of the land was actually owned directly by those who cultivated it. 7 However, ownership, which often implied ideal shares of the land rent rather than ownership of land, laid the basis for a favourable system from a tenant perspective (life time tenancy, tenancy of inheritance and major rights of land disposial).
Altogether, the number of freeholders was substantial in the sixteenth-century Nordic area, but, excepting Finland, the share of tenants on Crown, noble, or other private land was equally or even more significant. Their number increased in the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries all over the Swedish realm as a growing number of farms were granted as fiefs and donations to the nobility. This did not automatically mean the transfer of ownership from freeholders to the new lords but the possible inability to pay taxes did. At the same time, Finland and Norway witnessed the novelty of large earldoms and baronies. In principle, the seigneurial rights were limited to collecting taxes, but there was also a strong tendency to extend them to cover administrative and judicial powers. Tenants on noble land also had to do day labour for their lords. In Finland, the position of the tenants did not in general differ dramatically from the freeholders in terms of the tenure of the land as the standard procedure was that the occupation of these farms was inherited in the family in the same way as the freeholdersâ farms. The situation in Norway was much the same, apart from a few fixed-term contracts issued by private owners. 8
Having said this, the peasants of Norway, Sweden, and Finland generally had a fair degree of personal and political agency compared to most of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. They were socioeconomically the backbone of the economy as the towns were still modest in size, and even being a tenant did not necessarily mean worse conditions or being poorer than freeholders. In the Swedish realm, the freeholders and Crownâs tenants were quite exceptionally represented by a fourth estate in the Diet (Riksdag), along with nobility, priests, and burghers in the other three estates. 9
Some of these bönder, whether they were freeholders or tenants, amassed a fair amount of wealth and property, and they often had connections with the gentry, clergy, and burghers. These are the peopleâthe elite among peasantsâthat this book is dealing with. It focuses on the connection between aggression and violence and this elite status in peasant communities. This has not been a visible theme in the abundant research on violence and revolts in early modern Nordic countries, although using physical force to exert social dominance has been recognised as an essential part of early modern Nordic society. The idea of this book is to look at the peasant elites from the perspective of aggressiveness and violence during a period when the intensification of state administration was reshaping local power structures. Local peasant elites occupied a specific status as a mediating group between peasants, Crown officials, gentry, and other literate groups in society. At the same time, historical evidence suggests that they were even more aggressive and violent than other peasants in their communities.
The authors of this volume share an open approach to the peasant community, seeing it more as a heterogeneous group than any kind of homogeneous entity. The principal idea is to consider them as active agentsâpeople who were acting and interacting, not just reacting. The traditional view of peasantry as a solid community that had to face aggressive demands from the representatives of the expanding state administration and high-handed nobility is thus challenged by scrutinising the various regional peasant elites with their wider economic and political interests, abilities to resist, links to local administration, own inner power struggles, and readiness to use the local courts to voice their concerns.
Peasant Elites, Elite Peasants
In contrast to the prevailing system in Eastern Europeâfor instance, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, large parts of Germanophone Europe, Russia, and the Baltic areaâwhere peasants were controlled by serfdom, 10 to the west and north of the continent there were more opportunities for economic, social, and political agency available. Access to land was a vital question for all the rural population, and to have favourable terms that enabled this was the key to peasantsâ economic success. In most areas, it was not common that peasants owned the land they cultivated. 11 For instance, in Germany, the number of freeholders was relatively small at the turn of the seventeenth century. Rural areas were dominated by nobility who owned virtually all the agricultural land. There was an almost chaotic variety of systems of tenure. In the sixteenth century, peasantsâ obligations had increased, and great noble latifundia were formed in the eastern parts of Germany, which meant the abolition of independent peasant farms there. 12
Despite the lack of ownership rights, local communities all around Western Europe were clearly stratified and had their own elite groups, a phenomenon that has caught the attention of historians in the last decades. âPeasant communitiesâ that seem homogenous when viewed from above now appear to have been quite diverse on the micro-level, even in the Middle Ages. In the early modern period, the degree of differentiation only increased further as landownership became concentrated in the hands of a few. In general, by the end of the sixteenth century, the rural population of Western Europe was highly differentiated. Some of the winners were the better-off peasants, who could afford more land and then market the surplus. 13
Terms of tenure and the size and quality of land were the decisive factors for determining the socioeconomic success of farmers. If the farm could be passed on intact to the next generation, peasant families could accumulate wealth. 14 Trade offered additional possibilities if it was only allowed for farmers. 15 In England especially, a group of commercial farmers had emerged already in the late Middle Ages who farmed for the market rather than to just feed their families. The wealthiest of the yeomen sometimes even surpassed the smaller gentry in terms of wealth. 16
All this resulted in elite groups within the peasantry, whether they were âGrossbauernâ, âyeomenâ, or the âcoqs de villageâ. They had larger holdings, had a higher standard of living, and hired servants, and their status was that of a mediating group between the lords and people of the village community. 17 They applied several processes of exclusion within the local communities. Participation in decision-making was often restricted to this group of wealthier peasants, as were community offices, which cou...