The Agrarian History of Sweden Read online

  A short presentation of the most important sources will give an indication of what is available. Amongst the most significant written sources are the short documents called charters (brev or diplom), which in the main are records of land and landownership. They survive in their tens of thousands. Another important source of information is medieval law. Ten regional law codes have survived from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (Fig. 3.1), followed in the mid fourteenth century by a unified law that applied to the whole of Sweden (the landslag, or Magnus Erikssons landslag). There are also a number of narrative sources of various kinds.

  Archaeology is one of the strongest sources. Sweden might never have had the magnificent castles or cathedrals of the rest of Europe, but several smaller strongholds have been excavated, along with a number of medieval villages and farms. From the town middens comes a wealth of wooden objects. There are few surviving illuminated manuscripts that were produced in Sweden, but there is a rich vein of ecclesiastical art, not least the many church murals of the fifteenth century. To handle this plurality of sources a method has to be developed that takes into account the specific information each type of source can deliver.2

  The sixteenth century brought with it a veritable flood of written sources. Sweden was to become one of the most well-organized states in Europe, and there have been few purges of the Crown’s archives over the centuries. From at least the 1540s, every farm has in principle appeared in the official record several times a year, in tithe and tax registers. Indeed, everything that fell under the aegis of the state was carefully documented. Sweden’s official records also stand out cartographically, for in the seventeenth century–first in the 1630s and 1640s, and again in the 1690s and around 1700–detailed maps of most villages were prepared.3

  A feudal society

  The period this chapter addresses is described as ‘feudal’, the main reasons being that the bare bones of the social structure remained basically unchanged from the thirteenth century until the eighteenth, and that it was to be found–in its broad outlines–across most of Europe. The term has been questioned, not least since Sweden is often singled out as an exception because of the relatively strong position enjoyed by its bönder (variously, farmers, peasants, or peasant-farmers), and for that reason it is worth defining the various meanings of bonde as they are used here. Before 1000, they should be thought of as ‘farmers’– people who farmed–albeit totally different from farmers in modern times. The term ‘peasant’ is a good approximation for the Middle Ages up to the seventeenth century, as the farmers now formed part of a complex society –a state that extracted surplus production –but were not yet farmers in the modern sense. For the eighteenth century we will use the term ‘peasant-farmer’ (see p. 122) to mark the difference from the ‘farmer’ of the mid nineteenth century onwards. Thus ‘peasant’ in this chapter is closely related to ‘feudalism’, which in the popular mind is often thought synonymous with hierarchy and oppression. Certainly the social system brought varying degrees of repression, but the change after about 1000 meant a greater freedom for many, and the new social web allowed changes that were advantageous to the lower classes. Feudalism as mere oppression is a simplification, because it was open to societal organization from below.

  Among scholars two definitions of feudalism prevail: one ‘narrow’ and one ‘broad’. In the more narrow sense ‘feudalism’ denotes a system in which vassals held their land in fief from the monarch, and further down the hierarchy vassals held land from other vassals. This has also been described more vaguely as a decentralized political system. Critics argue that the system of fiefs and vassals is a later construction, and not valid for most of Europe during the Middle Ages.4 Personal bonds certainly played a role, in Sweden as elsewhere, but in this chapter I will make use of the broader approach outlined by Marc Bloch.5 Bloch was inspired by Marxism, but forged his own concept. Generally speaking, in the Marxist tradition feudalism is used to describe a social structure dominated by the relationship between landlords and peasants, emphasizing the latter’s violent suppression and exploitation; indeed, serfdom is frequently taken to be a central feature of feudalism. This is a description that denotes ‘capitalism’ as a step forward, but many Marxists have used ‘feudalism’ in a wider sense; namely as an entire social system, in which the social relationship between the landlords and peasants is just one part of an larger societal whole. Some even declare that a market economy is a typical feature of feudalism.6

  Following scholars who make use of the broader definition of feudalism, I take this type of social web to correspond to the technological complex. The complex formed a package of elements introduced at much the same time (‘technological complex’ is a concept to which I will return). The social structure was not determined by just one or even a few fundamental factors such as landownership, but by an elaborate latticework of conjoined social institutions. The nobility, the Church, landownership and the dues it generated, the state, and taxation were all parts of this feudal structure, but there were also collective entities such as the village community and the relatively independent town councils.

  Feudal society had a strict hierarchy, with a specialized warrior caste controlling the state and much of the land, and a specialized religious institution, but it was also formed by predominantly small-scale peasant production, where all peasants paid taxes or rents to the state or the landowners. Counterbalancing hierarchism, a strong communalism prevailed, in Sweden with district courts (häradsting), village communities, and (at least in the Late Middle Ages) largely self-governing parishes.

  Feudalism in this broad sense is a European phenomenon, but within the framework of this system there was a wide diversity. According to this definition there is no such thing as a ‘typical feudalism’ to be found, say, in northern France. Equally important is the recognition that general change could occur within the broader framework. Crucial here was the transition from particularistic feudalism before 1500 to ‘state feudalism’ thereafter, by which a decentralized socio-political system was replaced by a centralized system. The nobility and many other elements in the social web did not disappear, but were reorganized under the aegis of the Crown.

  Thus I argue that Sweden in the High Middle Ages, in a process already under way in the eleventh century and partly already in the Viking Age (see p. 70), took on a social structure that in its basic contours would have been recognizable across much of Europe. This new social structure was established in the late twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century, later than in most European countries, and would remain the controlling factor in Sweden until the eighteenth century–and in some respects well into the nineteenth century.

  Expansion and crisis, 1000–1450

  Demography set the basic rhythm. Following a drop in population in the middle of the first millennium AD, there was a slow recovery in numbers. By combining a variety of sources such as archaeological finds, place names, and, for later periods, written sources, it is possible to reconstruct the broad population trends. Starting in the eleventh century, the rate of population increase continued to rise until the fourteenth century. The Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague resulted in a deep trough, and it was only from the middle of the fifteenth century that a new, sustained increase set in.

  The estimates of Sweden’s population given here reflect the country’s modern borders by including Skåne (and other provinces in the south and west) but excluding Finland. The earliest numbers are more or less guesswork, from the mid fourteenth century we are on firmer ground, and from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the numbers are reliable because they are based on an enormous quantity of sources. In 1000 the population is estimated to have been between 300,000 and 450,000; in 1350 it was c. 900,000; in 1450 it had fallen to 450,000–500,000; in 1520 it was c. 600,000; in 1600, 1,000,000; and finally in 1720, 1,400,000.7

  Before the eleventh century vast expanses of countryside devoid of settlement ran the length of the then border between Denmark and Sweden. Another enormous stretch of nearly uninhabited woodland spanned large tracts of central Sweden, separating Götaland from Svealand. The more densely inhabited plains were generally limited to Skåne, the central parts of Östergötland and Västergötland, and around Lake Mälaren in central Sweden. In the north, there were settlements along the coast and the Dalälven, and on the shores of Lake Storsjön in Jämtland. The Sami lived in the interior of Norrland, where at this time they still primarily lived by hunting and fishing. Reindeer herding had not yet expanded to become the main occupation of most Sami.

  Three factors contributed to the long demographic expansion that spanned the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries: social change; technological innovation; and favourable climatic conditions, as temperatures peaked in that particular climate cycle. The population rise had already begun in the eighth century, showing itself as a gradual increase in settlement density in already inhabited areas, and it would continue to rise there in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. By the tenth century, the settlements were encroaching on the fringes of the large woodlands. The first step was to burn the woods to create grazing after taking a few crops. Then settlers established small enclosures as islands in the large woods. From the eleventh century the wooded areas in southern and central Sweden were gradually encroached upon, and absorbed piecewise into an orderly, though sparsely populated, countryside. A network of farms began to stretch out over the southern woodlands.8

  The thirteenth century saw an even faster expansion into the large wooded areas, impelled in part by the end of slavery (thraldom). Former slaves moved into the woodlands as settlers. As part of the same process of social change, it was now possible for formal contracts to be drawn up between landowner and tenant, which, by prot
ecting the relationship in law, removed the need for the landowner’s immediate physical control. Another factor in the expansion was iron production. Many of the small forest farms in the south gathered and worked bog ore, and it was also at this time that iron-mining began in Bergslagen, the mountainous district north of Lake Mälaren, further adding to the number of new settlements in that region.

  Much of the land clearance was undertaken on what was to be freeholders’ land, although slowly but surely the nobility and the Church showed an increasing interest in reclaiming land in order to increase their incomes from rents and taxes. In his ground-breaking work on rural society in western Europe, Georges Duby has highlighted the change that came when the nobility and the Church gradually became more interested in the expansion during the High Middle Ages.9 Something similar happened in Sweden.

  In the far north, massive clearances got underway at the start of the fourteenth century. Surviving correspondence shows that the archbishop of Sweden, together with the country’s leading nobles, organized and defrayed the costs of one such large-scale enterprise in the 1320s. Settlers were shipped north to clear new land and build houses at the mouths of the most northerly rivers.10 This project with recruited settlers had much in common with the German expansion eastwards, which doubtless was to some extent an inspiration for the Swedish nobility at the time.

  A new factor was monasticism, the importance of which for the expansion has been overestimated in popular belief. Monasteries were established in Sweden long after the expansion had started. Many of the early monasteries in Sweden were Cistercian, an order that in principle founded its houses on virgin soil, but in reality nearly all of them were sited in the rich and already cultivated plains. That said, the Cistercians did undertake large clearances, as for example at the monastery at Alvastra in Östergötland, on the eastern side of Lake Vättern. The monastery set up outlying farms or granges in the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the western side of the lake in the woodlands of Västergötland, which had been one of central Sweden’s empty tracts in the late Iron Age.11 This and the archbishop’s activities in the far north can be taken as indicators of the increasing interest in economic expansion and reclamation among the Swedish elite in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  During the fourteenth century, expansion on the plains ceased. In the 1310s, southern Scandinavia, like much of continental Europe, was hit hard not only by a series of bad harvests and famines, but also by cattle plagues.12 In the woodlands of southern and central Sweden, the limits to expansion with current techniques were being reached at much the same time, and conflicts over land were on the increase. However, in the woodlands above the Mälaren valley and northwards, land clearance continued apace until 1350.13 In this respect, the differences between north and south are also evident in the regional laws from the decades around 1300. In the southern Swedish laws, restrictions were placed on land clearance, but in the north it was still essentially unrestrained. The northern resources remained to some extent untapped.

  The expansion came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the fourteenth century. The cause was plague. Sweden, like the rest of Europe, was struck by three catastrophic epidemics in a twenty-year period: 1350, 1359–60, and 1368–9. Not for nothing is the first epidemic still referred to as digerdöden in Swedish, from the Old Swedish digher, ‘great’, and död, ‘death’; similar terms–the Great Mortality–were used throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, while ‘the Black Death’ was only coined much later.

  The first epidemic swept across Sweden in the late summer and autumn of 1350, spreading from the west and south up the coasts and along the roads through the interior. Mortality rates may have been as high as 30–40 per cent, although the elite survived in greater numbers. The nature of the disease is still under discussion–usually it is assumed to have been bubonic plague, but in modern times that disease kills the upper classes as well as the lower classes. The two subsequent epidemics wreaked similar havoc, and by the time they had passed, the population in Sweden had dropped to about half its previous total.14

  There followed a long period in the last quarter of the fourteenth century during which epidemics left little trace in the surviving sources. This lull may have been the result of a decline in virulence; certainly it has little to do with source survival, for the quantity of evidence remains large. The economy did not recover, and there was no population increase. A long-running civil war and repression at the close of the fourteenth century contributed to the stagnation. At the start of the fifteenth century the plague returned with a vengeance, with major epidemics in the 1410s and at the start of the 1420s. Thereafter the epidemics became less severe with each recurrence.

  Despite the enormous number of deaths from the very start, it was only some years after 1350 that abandoned farms began to appear in any quantity in the source material: there were still enough people with little or no land who were prepared to take over empty farms after the first epidemic. In the plains of central Uppland, it was noted in the 1370s that a number of farms had been taken back into use (at lower rents), apparently after they had been deserted for a short time. Besides the landless who were prepared to take over farms, there was also the continued flow of people from the woodlands to the plains, where they could get better farmland. It was the small, remote farms deep in the woods that were abandoned first. Some of them were overgrown by trees, others became meadowland for nearby farms. In the more fertile plains, fields from abandoned farms often remained under cultivation, but were taken over by other farms.

  The turning-point came in the middle of the fifteenth century. In the 1460s, economic activity began to pick up, as can be seen in a variety of sources. Clear evidence comes from timber-built houses that have been dated using dendrochronology. A number of such houses have been preserved in which the timber can be dated to the thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries. With the great epidemics, the construction of new houses stopped dead in the 1360s, and no timber can be dated to the century following. It was only in the 1460s that felling for timber to build farmhouses resumed.15

  As the population increased, some of the abandoned farms were taken back into use, but many of them had ceased to exist when other farms assimilated their land. The result of the upswing, when it came, was that many began to look even further afield for undeveloped land. Clearances in the sixteenth century spread further into the woodlands even before the population had returned to the size it had been in the mid fourteenth century.

  The resumption of cultivation was also a reflection of the fact that the north Scandinavian tracts of woodland were something of an agricultural frontier in northern Europe. With ever-more advanced techniques, it became possible to put this kind of land to full use, for example by using transhumance. It also held unexploited resources that the previous drive for land in the High Middle Ages had not reached. It was for these reasons that the late medieval expansion became particularly strong in Norrland, and, it should be noted, in Finland.

  The standard of living increased for the population at large at the end of the Middle Ages as a result of farms being larger on average and production methods more efficient, and of taxes and rents decreasing. The ordinary peasant family could consume more expensive foodstuffs, as well as products such as broadcloth and iron. The Late Middle Ages were characterized by the emergence of non-agrarian livelihoods, part and parcel of the rising standard of living across the population as a whole. This favoured regions such as the mining districts in central Sweden. The towns also did better than the countryside. After a pause, new towns began to be founded again in about 1400, well before the general increase in rural population.16

  Agricultural technology

  Throughout history, human exertions have resulted in the constant development of farming technology, but in certain periods the innovations came more frequently than in others. The High Middle Ages were one such innovative period. During this transformation a new ‘technological complex’ consisting of a whole series of technological innovations was put in place that set in motion a period of relatively rapid transformation.17 Technological change showed some geographical variation, but there were common, Europe-wide factors such as the increased use of iron, improved cultivation systems, and the rising production of cereals per unit area. Increased demand for iron and improved methods of its production fed off each other, with the result that both production and trade intensified. The wave of new towns founded during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries was thus strongly linked to the agrarian transformation then underway. Interdependence between the rural and the urban community, with a gradually more commercialized agriculture, became an essential element in the socio-economic structure.