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| The Harvesters by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526-1569) |
Ancient Farming
The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human history from small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early civilization. It started around 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped region of the Middle East where humans first took up farming. Shortly after, Stone Age humans in other parts of the world also began to practice agriculture. Civilizations and cities grew out of the innovations of the Neolithic Revolution. The advent of agriculture separated Neolithic people from their Paleolithic ancestors.
Many facets of modern civilization can be traced to this moment in history when people started living and farming together in communities.
For many thousands of years, agriculture was the basis of human existence. Life revolved around the home, the village, and the fields.
Medieval Farming in Sweden
Almost all of the medieval people in Sweden lived in villages in the countryside where they subsisted on agriculture. The farmers' years revolved around sowing and harvesting. The period between March and October was the period of intensive, uninterrupted work, followed by a few cold months of darkness and rest.
Sowing generally occurred in April-May and the harvest in August-September. During "vårand" (Spring sowing) and "skördand" (Autumn harvest) it was forbidden to sue anyone, as no one had time to appear before the court. Some holidays could also be used for work, and the villagers were forbidden to move as that could place an undo hardship on others to complete their work.
The harvest was the most labor-intensive period when even women and children were expected to pitch in. The local governing body stipulated that landless people could be forced to take up employment with the farmers during the harvest.
When the harvest was over, the villagers would arrange a party and celebrate together.
Barley, used for bread and beer, was the dominant cereal crop, followed by wheat, and the introduction of millet and oats. Rye was rare until the 11th century but increased in proportion to other cereal crops as it could be grown on lean soils. Rye was used to bake yeast bread for humans and it provided good quality straw for animals.
The division of labor between the sexes existed among the medieval peasant society in Sweden. With some exceptions, while the men took care of the heavy work in the fields and meadows, the women were responsible for the chores at home: baking, curdling, brewing, cooking, clothing-making, bedding, and the care and supervision of children and animals. The work of sowing and harvesting - and to some extent the taming of horses - were often common chores.
Around 1300, agricultural expansion took place to accommodate a growing population. Crop rotation, improved drainage, and irrigation ditches were developed to increase crop production. It was also during this period that the horseshoe, harness, plow, harrow, and the iron shovel were put into use.
Some of the landless peasants who made up much of the population were descendants of slaves, a hierarchical system which went back to the Vikings and beyond. By the 14th century, as Christianity took hold and began to replace Paganism, most of the children of slaves had been set free; however, the class-system which kept them in poverty remained.
Farming During the Early Modern Period
By the early 16th century, Swedish land was owned by only three entities: the crown (government-owned land), the nobility (land owned by Swedish royalty), and "skattebönder" (which literally means taxed freeholders) who were land-owning peasant farmers. In 1700, about 1/3 of arable land was owned by the crown, 1/3 by the nobility (which made up .5% of the population), and 1/3 by independent farmers.
By 1845, the independent farmers owned about 60% of the arable land as a result of purchasing both crown and nobility land.
Crown or government-owned land was leased out to tenant farmers. There were exceptions to this, and throughout the years laws changed, but generally speaking, tenancy contracts were for a period of 6 years payable annually to the crown. If the tenant farmer met all the conditions of the contract throughout the entire term, he could gain possession of the land he used. This right could be revoked by the crown; however, the inheritable right of possession was strengthened by a law passed in 1789.
The skattebönder (land-owning farmers) could lose their rights to their land if they did not abide by all the rules: they had to farm it themselves - they could not lease the land out to tenant farmers, and they had to pay the taxes annually to the crown (government). If they wanted or needed to sell their land, they had to offer it to a family member first before it could be sold to someone outside the family. This law (abandoned in 1863) was meant to keep property within families. Land rights were inheritable, and private landowners could pass their land down to the next generation.
Land owned by the nobility was leased in portions to tenant farmers. The nobility paid the government tax, and the tenant farmers compensated the landowner with a fixed number of days' labor per year on the landowners' own estate. Sometimes tenant farmers were able to claim possession of land leased from nobility after a period of time, but the right of possession was not as strong with nobility land as it was with crown land. Tenancies were often inheritable, so as tenant farmers aged and were unable to accomplish long days of manual labor, a son (usually the oldest) could inherit the lease. If the amount of land could support more than one family, the lease could be divided among more than one son.
In early times, landed peasant families generally owned at least one mantal of land. Based on a measurement developed centuries earlier, a mantal represented the minimum amount of land a farmer needed to support his family. A mantal was not an exact amount of land, but varied depending on the time period and region of the country.
As time passed, farmers divided their holdings into smaller
and smaller pieces in order to pass them on to multiple heirs. Eventually, it
became rare for a peasant to own an entire mantal of land. Small improvements
in agriculture also meant that a farmer needed less land to support his family.
By the early 1800s, it was believed that a farmer could support his family on 1/16 of a mantal,
making this the determining factor which placed a family in the landed peasants
group of society.
Families owning less than 1/16 of a mantal of land fell into
the category of “semilandless peasants” -peasants who didn’t have enough land
to support their families fully. These families supplemented their incomes by
working on other people’s land as day laborers or by performing a trade on the
side. Some semilandless peasants occasionally employed outside help, but mostly they relied on the labor of their own family members. Most built or owned their own home,
but their homes were often considerably smaller than their fully-landed peasant neighbors. At the bottom of society were the peasant farmers who owned no land, a group which seemed to be ever expanding.
In many parts of Sweden, a "solskifte" system of land division within a village had been adopted. In order to divide the land fairly between heirs, and to allow for a plot of land to connect to a water source, farmers divided their land into long narrow strips, sometimes narrower than the plow itself. The continual buying, selling, dividing, and inheriting of these long, narrow pieces of land meant that farmers with significant landholdings often owned many unconnected pieces of land which were scattered throughout the jurisdiction.
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| Strip Farming System in a Swedish Village |
The fertilization of fields demonstrates the inefficiencies of the solskifte system. To complete this task, a farmer and his farmhands loaded up the manure near the family’s home and transported it to the fields. However, since the fields were located so far from one another and from the family’s home, they spent a great deal of the day walking between places. In fact, they may have walked one hour from their home to a strip of land they intended to fertilize. Most farmers had some landholdings that lay dormant as they were simply too far away to make planting and harvesting practical.
The division of land into narrow strips also made it impossible for one peasant to harvest his land without disturbing the surrounding fields. To combat this problem, village associations would assign days for planting and harvesting.
"Bytväng" or village compulsion tied the individual villager into a rigid communal system of farming. Village farms and individual tenant farmers were subjected to established bylaws and collective responsibilities. Conformity to the laws and the will of the village governing body was unavoidable, and nonconformity was punishable by fines and social shaming.
Landowning peasants and some skilled craftsman belonged to the village council. Village councils served as governing boards, making important decisions that residents were required to live by. In some villages, members of the council attended meetings every Sunday afternoon from the beginning of May to the end of September, and on other occasions as needed. They would gather outdoors around a large rock or other landmark near the center of the village.
Many of the topics discussed at meetings centered on
cooperation in farming. Councils chose planting and harvesting dates and set
rules for crop rotation and grazing animals. They also made assignments for
shared tasks, such as fence building. They would jointly hire a
shepherd, if needed, who was responsible for watching over all the village livestock. Each council
member was expected to contribute money or payment in kind to compensate the shepherd.
Villagers also cooperated in guarding the village pond during the winter. Once
the pond froze over, they took turns standing near it, making sure no animals
fell through as they drank from a small hole in the ice.
No one could raise crops different from his neighbors' or introduce a different rotation. Winter grain could not be used if the neighbors used spring grain because they would have to be sown and harvested at different times. A vivid, although somewhat biased, illustration of the system appeared in a scholarly publication in 1755:
The sharing of fields, meadows, woods, and wild lands is but the nurse of a country's poverty. For as long as no one looks after his own, all husbandry is capricious as the moon, though rather on the want than on the wax. I shall mention one or two of the innumerable abuses to which it leads.
Where neighbors are sharing fields and pastures, the fields are often not plowed or else they are not plowed in time. One must sow when his neighbor sows, whether the soil be ready or not. One must cut when his neighbor cuts, whether the crop be ripe or not. One must not change his crop to refresh the often unripe, and during its best period of growth. One must, to his great harm. Let the cattle graze the fields in springtime and fall, as the neighbor may please.
The Redistribution of Land Holding
By the mid 1700s, it had become obvious that the frequent land divisions caused by inheritance practices had produced a system of incredible inefficiency. Peasants could own as many as one hundred separate pieces of land, some as small as one square foot. With every passing generation, peasants divided the land into smaller and smaller holdings in order to pass land on to all of their male children. Even if land holdings were of exceptional high quality, productivity remained scarcely above what it had been in the Middle Ages.
Swedish officials began taking steps to rectify the situation. The first attempt was the Storskifte Act of 1757. Under this law, at the request of only one landowner, the process of land consolidation could begin. A surveyor held a series of meetings with the village landowners. Here, they sought to find a redistribution plan to which all could agree. In the end, the 1757 Act produced limited results. Although many strips were consolidated, landed peasants still often retained twelve to fifteen separate pieces of land, and sometimes much more.
The ineffectiveness of the Storskifte Act showed some of the
inherent difficulties in finding a solution to the land problem. Soil quality and
distance to the village center varied from one piece of land to the
next. This made it difficult for landowners to agree on which land was of equal
value in order to conduct fair exchanges and consolidations. It would take
something far more extensive than the Storskifte Act to bring about effective
change.
Additional land reforms happened throughout the country with mixed success and support. In 1803 the "Enskifte" law was created. It only took 1 village resident to initiate the process and all villagers were legally bound to submit. A surveyor would be called to appraise all the land in the village and it would then be divided it into [preferably square-shaped] plots. Once that was done, plots were assigned as the peasants drew lots.
The law was met with great resistance. Many viewed the law as unfair. Perhaps more importantly, the new system disrupted their entire way of life. Solskifte had allowed peasants to live near one another in small villages, a system which had formed tight-knit social support for generations of people. The obliteration of the strip-fields also meant the obliteration of the village. Most of the houses in the village center were torn down (a few of the newer and sturdier homes were allowed to stay standing). All of the peasant families had to move to their new consolidated plot of land and rebuild their homes, far away from one another.
In addition, the expense incurred by moving imposed an
economic hardship on most peasants. Besides the cost of the new home itself, the
time and energy required to rebuild cut drastically into the time they could
spend working their land. Later, as the changes spread, the government provided
some financial relocation support. However for most peasants, the support
proved inadequate. Although the king at the time had stated that the primary motivation was the need for improved productivity and efficiency of the land, many who were affected believed it was actually created to divide the peasant class in an effort to keep them powerless and repressed.
In 1827, a distribution statute was created that was implemented in the whole of Sweden called "lagaskifte" and was fully implemented throughout the country over the next 2 decades. Land re-distribution within an individual village was no longer at the request of one or more villager, but it became a legal requirement within every jurisdiction. Central villages were completely disbanded as any remaining villagers relocated. Fences and boundary walls were established, and individual farmers were free to manage their own plot of land as they saw fit.
Unfortunately, the series of land reforms didn't completely solve the problems the Swedish people would still be forced to endure. Productivity and efficiency did increase as expected, but the division of the fields further increased the economic and social disparity between the people. Some of the poorer farmers on very small parcels of land were squeezed out and forced to sell as tracts of land were merged together. Others with limited power or resources ended up with marshland or sandy soil which proved to be unproductive and severely deficient. Many who no longer had access to land were forced to work as day laborers on larger farms or, if that option was not available to them within their parish, they lived in small, makeshift "back cabins" on borrowed or public land.
While the final lagaskifte land reforms were happening, the population of Sweden was exploding. During the 19th century, the number of Swedes doubled from 2 million to 4 million people, in part due to "peace, vaccine, and the potato," (referring to Sweden becoming a peace-loving country by about 1815 and no longer engaging in war, the development of the small pox vaccine in 1796, and the potato becoming a staple crop in the 1700s which kept poor people from starving). Many small farms, which had been redistributed and consolidated, were split yet again into even smaller land holdings through land inheritances of multiple heirs.
Industrialization, which first occurred in Great Britain, was finding its way into Swedish cities. Many adult children of rural farmers were taking to the cities, hoping to obtain work. Factories were springing up; however, the demand for workers could not keep up with the seemingly endless supply of the displaced and unemployed. Those who were able to find factory work lived in cramped, dreary apartments which they often had to share with strangers. Additionally, farming methods were becoming modernized and streamlined, leaving fewer and fewer job opportunities for willing farm laborers. What had, for generations of Swedish farmers, been accomplished through the efforts of multiple farmhands was more efficiently done by modern machinery.
There were just not enough land holdings, factory jobs, or resources to go around. The number of poor and homeless people only continued to increase.
By the mid 1800s, Swedes began emigrating to America, and by 1910 it was estimated that 1 million Swedes had made America their home, pursuing the American promise of personal freedom, free land, and endless opportunity. In the early 20th century, more Swedes lived in Chicago than in Göteborg, Sweden's 2nd largest city.
Not only had the villages been disbanded, the ancient, rural family structure which had existed for centuries began to break up and disintegrate.
For centuries and through multiple generations, one large branch of my ancestral family called Sätila their home. Together they worked the land, cared for their animals, raised their children, and managed their meager resources with skills passed down from one generation to the next. They were an integral part of a nuclear community upon which they depended for support, socialization, and goodwill. But, by virtue of modernization, industrialization, and an ever-increasing population, by 1900, when Sven Bengtsson died, no one in my direct family line remained.
Sources and more information can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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