Preliminary Programme

Landed peasants in Medieval and Early modern Sweden usually had to perform corvée labour for the state as a part of their annual taxes. The landless, although working for and paying fees to the landholding peasants or land-owning lords, were on the other hand generally exempt from paying any taxes to or performing any work for the crown. However, during a couple of decades in the middle of the sixteenth century, also landless men had to make annual contributions to the fiscal state, either through corvée labour at crown manors or through paying pecuniary fees. This paper explores how this compulsory labour for the rural poor came into being, by asking how it was motivated by the government officials when first introduced, how it was implemented and upheld over time, and why it seems to have come to an end after a comparatively short time. It will further address the practices of this compulsory labour: what forms of labour were demanded, how was this labour organised and supervised, and how important was it for the manorial economy of the crown. (Show less)

The Lower Austrian manorial system in the Early Modern period has been characterized as a transition zone between the ideal types of “eastern demesne lordship” and “western rent-tacking lordship”. While some landlords raised their income in reaction to the sixteenth-century price revolution by selling goods to their subjects claiming banal rights, others expanded their arable demesne land and tried to establish new corvée obligations. Grain production was based on unpaid labour services by households equipped with the necessary draught animals for ploughing. In the production of wine, the dominant cash crop of Lower Austrian agriculture, wage labour relations were of major importance. In the seigneurial viticulture peculiar forms of remunerated corvée labour were established at the end of the sixteenth-century.1 It’s the aim of my paper to sketch the expansion of Lower Austrian manorial agriculture between 1550-1750 in quantitative terms, looking at urbarial records, tax assessments and accounting books. In a second step I want to reconstruct the different forms of labour arrangements in the cultivation of the seigneurial fields and vineyards and to discuss the perceptions of those labour relations in sources like instructions, correspondences or court records. This enables us to understand better how Lower Austrian landlords were able to enforce or negotiate corvée labour and what kind of limits or forms of resistance restricted their intentions. (Show less)

In the preindustrial agrarian setting, labour was organized and structured with varying degrees of coercion depending on landowning, social standing, and gender. This article analyses the crofter institution, characterized by corvée labour (obligatory work as payment), from the perspective of gender and coercion to answer the question: how was the crofter institution created, shaped, enabled and questioned? The right to establish a croft was a gendered concern which made the position as head of household available but at the same time increased social stratification through corvée labour. While crofters were masters of their households in contract signing; in organizing labour, their position was ambiguous. Regarding the physical integrity, the position of crofters resembled that of servants, who could be forced by physical violence and subject to rules not connected to work, such as subservience. The legal position of the crofters was characterized by the principle of contracts surpassing laws, and I argue that this was made acceptable through marriage. The strive to write the history as heading towards modernization and contracts between equals points to the 18th century as the repressive height. However, crofters were not offered protection until 1907, and continued to be demanded subservience and labour until 1943. (Show less)