Asserting One's Rights: Swedish Property Law in the Transition from Community Law to State Law

Law and History Review

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 241-282

  Ågren, Maria ^a  

^a UPPSALA UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

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EID: 85011480580     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/744130     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. Svea hovratts arkiv, Liber causarum 135:9, case no. 17, fol. 9. Riksarkivet, Stockholm (hereafter RA).
2. To translate the Swedish term is not uncomplicated. It is useful, however, to compare the description of prescriptive titles given in A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Land Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 109f. Simpson quotes Bracton's definition of the user needed to found such a title: “user for a long time with peaceful, continuous and uninterrupted enjoyment of the right” and also mentions that the common law looked upon long user as based on “time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” This description fits very well with the title of urminnes havd. Bracton also says that the lord should be aware of the use and choose not to interfere, but Simpson states that “in Bracton there is no theory that acquisition by prescription depends upon any fictional presumption of a lost grant; long user of itself founds a right of property.” By the seventeenth century, however, legal doctrine had begun to assume that such a use was based on a previous grant by the lord. The idea of a grant is absent in the case of urminnes havd, even though, as we shall see, the notion of tacit consent resembles the notion of the landlord choosing not to interfere.
3. J. Loccenius, De Usucapione et Longi Temporis Praescriptione (dissertation, University of Uppsala, 1644), sec. xx; D. Sidenius, De Immemoriali Praescriptione (dissertation, University of Uppsala, 1662), thesis 1, vi.
4. See, for example, Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (London: Allen and Unwin, 1951); V. G. Kiernan, “Private Property in History,” in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge 1976). A useful point of departure is also provided in Andrew Reeve, Property (London: Macmillan, 1986).
5. For a theoretically inspired discussion of this, see, for example, Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1946; Swedish edition, 1981), chaps. 5 and 6; for a local study, see E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975).
6. Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4,1500-1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 200-55; Alan Everitt, “Farm Laborers,” Studies in the Development of Capitalism., 406-12. J. R. Wordie, “Chronology of English Enclosure,” The Economic History Review 36 (November 1983): 502, estimates that 45 percent of England was enclosed already by 1500.
7. For a favorable view of enclosure, see, among others, J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880 (London: Batsford, 1966). For a more pessimistic view, see, for example, E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991); K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Jeanette M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
8. Cf. John Rule, “Against Innovation? Custom and Resistance in the Workplace, 1700-1850,” in Popular Culture in England, c. 1500-1850, ed. Tim Harris (London: Macmillan, 1995), 168-88, for the meaning of “custom” in the crafts sector.
9. Thompson, “Custom, Law and Common Right,” in Customs in Common, 97f.
10. Neeson, Commoners, 78, 84, 86, 92, 162. See also Charles E. Searle, “Custom, Class Conflict and Agrarian Capitalism: The Cumbrian Customary Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Past and Present 110 (1986), 106-33.
11. Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981); J.-M. Baland and J.-Ph. Platteau, “Division of the Commons: A Partial Assessment of the New Institutional Economics of Land Rights,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 80 (August 1998): 644-50.
12. Harold Demsetz, “Towards a Theory of Property Rights,” American Economic Review 57 (May 1967): 347-73.
13. See, for example, The Question of the Commons. The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources, ed. B. J. McCay and J. M. Acheson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987).
14. See, for example, Ronny Pettersson, Laga skifte i Hollands liin, 1827-1876 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1983).
15. Goran Hoppe and John Langton, Peasantry to Capitalism: Western Ostergotland in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography no. 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 58 (summarizing the work of, for example, Birgitta Olai and Kalle Back).
16. This is the theme of a dissertation project being undertaken in Gothenburg by Staffan Graner. See also Goran Hoppe, “Skiftesreformerna och agrarutvecklingen,” Bebyggelsehistorisk tidskhft 5 (1983): 32-45.
17. Thirsk, “Enclosing,” 240ff.
18. Christer Winberg, Grenverket. Studier rorande jord, slaktskapssystem och stdndsprivilegier, Rattshistoriskt bibliotek 38 (Stockholm: Nordiska Bokhandeln i Distribution, 1985).
19. Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.
20. Eva Osterberg, “Brott och rattspraxis i det forindustriella samhallet. Tendenser och tolkningar i skandinavisk forskning,” Historisk Tidskrift 2 (1993): 201-26.
21. Goran Inger, Svensk rattshistoria (rev. edition, Malmo: Liber Forlag, 1997), 70; Anna Christina Meurling, Svensk domstolsforvaltning i Livland, 1634-1700 (Lund: Gleerup, 1967), 44.
22. Disputes between noblemen and peasants were first tried in the hundred courts.
23. Janken Myrdal, Jordbruket under feodalismen, 1000-1700 (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur/LTs forlag, 1999), 261-70.
24. This does not apply to ethnologists and historical geographers, who have devoted a great deal of attention to village organization. See, e.g., Sigurd Erixon, Svenska byar Man systematisk reglering 1-2 (Stockholm: Nordiska Museet, 1960); Staffan Helmfrid, “The Storskifte, Enskifte and Laga Skifte in Sweden: General Features,” Geografiska Annaler 43.1-2(1961): 114-29.
25. These shares could be measured and expressed in various ways. See Kulturhistoriskt lexikonfor nordisk medeltid, vol. 2 (Malmo: Allhems Forlag, 1957), “Byamal,” cols. 389 ff.
26. Wolter Ehn, Motet mellan centralt och lokalt. Studier i upplandska byordningar (Uppsala: Dialekt-och folkminnesarkivet, 1991), 11.
27. Folke Dovring, Agrarhistorien (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1966), 55 ff.
28. Cf. Hoppe and Langton, Peasantry, 58. These authors mention that in the parts of Sweden where this system of solskifte had never been enforced, peasants were more worried about the impending enclosure, since “no certain measurements of the extent of farm properties existed.”
29. See for example Kulturhistoriskt lexikon for nordisk medeltid, vol. 2, “Bymark,” col. 426.
30. This policy can be compared with the restrictions imposed on some English tenants. See Jane Whittle, “Individualism and the Family-Land Bond: A Reassessment of Land Transfer Patterns among the English Peasantry c. 1270-1580,” Past and Present 160 (1998): 25-63.
31. Inger, Svensk rattshistoria, 98 f. Between 1459 and 1684 the prohibition against subdivision was rigorously upheld, but Inger points out that it is likely that farms were subdivided unofficially. The prohibition against piecemeal selling of land began to be enforced at the end of the seventeenth century.
32. Hoppe and Langton, Peasantry, 56 f.; Inger, Svensk rattshistoria, 99, who points out that children who could not inherit the farm were given a right to reclaim new land (instead of buying smaller pieces from their parents). This practice is investigated in Martti Rantanen, Tillvdxt i periferin. Befolkning och jordbruk i Sodra Osterbotten 1750-1890 (Goteborg: Ekonomisk-Historiska Institutionen vid Goteborgs Universitet, 1997).
33. G. E. Mingay, Land and Society in England, 1750-1980 (London, New York: Longman, 1994), 145. Neeson, Commoners, 308, argues that this is too low an estimate and that 20 to 30 percent is very probably a more accurate figure.
34. The nobility thus controlled as much as 60 percent of all incomes from landed property. Sven A. Nilsson, “Imperial Sweden: Nation-Building, War and Social Change,” in The Age of New Sweden, ed. Arne Losman, Agneta Lundstrom, Margareta Revera (Stockholm: Livrustkammaren, 1988), 23.
35. This point has been stressed in particular by Heikki Ylikangas, “Kampen mellan naturratt och romersk ratt i Sverige,” in Den svenska juridikens uppblomstring i 1600-talets politiska, kulturella och religiosa stormaktssamhalle, ed. Goran Inger, Rattshistoriska Studier no. 9 (Stockholm: Institutet for Rattshistorisk Forskning, 1984). It also stands out very clearly in Winberg, Grenverket.
36. Lars-Olof Larsson, “Borgratt och adelsjurisdiktion i medeltidens och 1600-talets Sverige,” in Historia och samhdlle. Studier tillagnade Jerker Rosen (Malmo: Studentlitteratur, 1975), and Kenneth Johansson, “Herrar och bonder. Om jurisdiktionen i nagra smalandska friherrskap pa 1600-talet,” Scandia 56.2 (1990): 161-91. These authors agree that, within the investigated area of jurisdiction, no special set of rules was used, but rather the ordinary legal code (combined, of course, with new statute laws). They mainly disagree about whether or not cases were scrutinized by the appeal courts in the same way as cases from the local hundred courts. See also Meurling, Svensk domstolsforvaltning, 44, who mentions that the Estonian nobility strongly opposed the proposal to make their verdicts subject to scrutiny by the Royal Court of Appeal in Dorpat.
37. Thomas Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden under dldre medeltid (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1979), which focuses on the early medieval situation but is of relevance for this period.
38. Jan Sundin, For Gud, Staten och Folket. Brott och rattskipning i Sverige 1600-1840, Rattshistoriskt Bibliotek no. 47 (Lund: Institutet for Rattshistorisk Forskning, 1992), 447 ff.; Rudolf Thunander, Hovratt ifunktion. Gota hovratt och brottmalen 1635-1699, Rattshistoriskt Bibliotek no. 49 (Lund: Institutet for Rattshistorisk Forskning, 1993), 282 ff. See also note 90 below.
39. Legal Code of King Christopher, Jordabalken 1.
40. A good example of this is that, according to the legal code, the kings of Sweden were to be elected. But since the reign of Gustav Vasa, the crown had been inherited. In spite of this glaring discrepancy on a very important issue, the wording of the legal code was not modified until 1734.
41. Maria Agren, Att hdvda sin ra'tt. Synen pa jordagandet i 1600-talets Sverige, speglad i institutet urminnes hdvd, Rattshistoriskt Bibliotek no. 57 (Stockholm: Nerenius and Santerus ForlagAB, 1997), 74 f., 206 f.
42. Legal Code of King Christopher, Konungabalken 2; Agren, Hdvda, 79.
43. Claes Ralamb, Observationes Juris Practicae (Stockholm, 1679), 1 f.
44. See Table 1, which shows that approximately 60 percent of farms (that is, those owned by the Crown/state and nobility) were held by tenants in the middle of the seventeenth century.
45. Since freeholding peasants were not allowed to let their land, i.e., to have tenants, this was not a problem to them before 1734 (when they were granted this right). Inger, Svensk rdttshistoria, 101, 149.
46. Charles Donahue Jr., “The Future of the Concept of Property Predicted from Its Past” in Property, ed. J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 33.
47. Ralamb, Observationes, 19 f. See also Agren, Hdvda, 96 f.
48. Chr. Prezbeckius, De possessione hominum memoriam excedente sveo-gothis dicta urminnes hafd (Gymnasion dissertation; Stockholm 1646), 400, sec. 4 (emphasis added).
49. C. J. Wahlberg, ktgarder for lagforbdttring 1633-1665 (Uppsala, 1877), 73; Agren, Havda, 102.
50. On the importance of Gemeinwohl, see, for example, W. Schulze, “Gerhard Oestreichs Begriff ‘Sozialdisziplinierung’ in der Friihen Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift fur Historische Forschung 14.1 (1987): 286.
51. The distinction between boundary disputes and disputes over pieces of land depends on the wordings used in the source material and should not be accorded too much importance.
52. Svea hovratts arkiv 1653, Anders Palmcrona v. Maria Stengafvel. RA; Agren, Havda, 144, 166. See also John Axel Almquist, Frdlsegodsen i Sverige under storhetstiden (Stockholm, 1934), 352 f.
53. Noblewomen also played an important role in preserving the memory of land rights; see Eva Haettner Aurelius, Infor lagen. Kvinnliga svenska sjalvbiografierfran Agneta Horn till Fredrika Bremer (Lund: Lund University Press, 1996), 80 ff.
54. Kvinnliga svenska sjalvbiografierfran Agneta Horn till Fredrika Bremer., 139 (emphasis added).
55. Neeson, Commoners, 78, 84, 86, 92, 162.
56. Thompson, “Custom,” 117 f.
57. That is, from the complementary sources included to overcome the bias of the appeal court material.
58. Larsson, “Borgratt,” 59, 61.
59. Sven A. Nilsson, Kampen om de adliga privilegierna, 1526-1594 (Lund: Gleerup, 1952), 24 ff., 47, 105 ff., 109, 119, 127.
60. Sveriges ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll (Stockholm, 1872), vol. 4.2, 492.
61. Winberg, Grenverket, chap. 3.
62. Sveriges rikes ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll, med tillhorande handlingar, frdn sjuttonde arhundradet (Stockholm, 1856), vol. 2, 182 f.
63. Cf. Eileen Spring, Law, Land and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), who makes similar remarks about the Tudors (94).
64. As Table 3 shows, peasants also used this argument, and if more material from the primary court level had been included, it is likely that we would have seen even more evidence of its use by peasants.
65. Gerald Strauss, Law, Resistance, and the State: The Opposition to Roman Law in Reformation Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 96 f.
66. Thompson, “Custom,” 101.
67. Sveriges ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll (Stockholm, 1899), vol. 15:76, 222, appendix 10, 193 f.
68. Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker, “The State, the Community and the Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, ed. V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (London: Europa Publications, 1980), 23 (emphasis added).
69. One of the main points of the article is to argue the impossibility of measuring crime. Lenman and Parker, “State,” 15.
70. Ralamb, Observationes, 16.
71. The same point is made, for example, in Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 136 f.; Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals. The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 58.
72. Uppldndska dombocker (Uppsala: Kungl. HumanistiskaVetenskapssamfundet i Uppsala, 1925-1950), vol. 8:42 (emphasis added).
73. TingsprotokollfdrNjumndall. Ur Medelpads dombocker 1673-1699, ed. Algot Hellbom (Sundsvall: Medelpads fornminnesforening i samarbete med Njurunda hembygdsforening, 1983), 1684, autumn session, case no. 6.
74. Svenskt diplomatarium (Stockholm: Riksarkivet), nos. 4964, 5896.
75. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 24, 208 ff., 232.
76. Lenman and Parker, “State,” 19.
77. Strauss, Law, 115.
78. See also Thompson, “Custom,” 126: “we should not press the distinction between prescriptive rights and rights established by custom too far.”
79. Among the first to describe this crisis were M. M. Postan, “Revisions in Economic History: The Fifteenth Century,” The Economic History Review 9 (1939), and Wilhelm Abel, Die Wustungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters (1943; 3d rev. ed., Stuttgart: G. Fischer Verlag, 1976).
80. See Svend Gissel, Eino Jutikkala, Eva Osterberg, Jorn Sandnes, and Bjorn Teitsson, Desertion and Land Colonization in the Nordic Countries c. 1300-1600 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1981), which argues that the general level of desertion was more modest (allowing for regional differences) than has recently been suggested by Janken Myrdal, “Senmedeltidens agrarkris. Odelaggelse och produktionsomvandling,” unpublished paper from the Department of Agrarian History, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 1997.
81. Gabriela Bjame Larsson, Stadgelagstiftning i senmedeltidens Sverige, Rattshistoriskt Bibliotek no. 51 (Stockholm: Nerenius and Santerus Forlag AB, 1994), 168 f.
82. C. Lundius, De Jure Usucapionis et Praescriptionis (dissertation, Uppsala University, 1698), chap. 3, 2, sec. 1.
83. Myrdal, Jordbruket, 221-23.
84. Gissel et al., Desertion, 121-28, 216-19.
85. Motiver, 89; Agren, Havda, 258 (emphasis added).
86. David Nehrman, De Praescriptione Immemoriali (Uppsala, 1750), sec. 9; Agren, Havda, 256, 259.
87. Erland Hofsten and Hans Lundstrom, Swedish Population History. Main Trends from 1750 to 1970, Urval, no. 8 (Stockholm: Statistiska Centralbyran, 1976).
88. Carl-Johan Gadd, “Jordbruksteknisk forandring i Sverige under 1700-och 1800-talen-regionala aspekter,” in Ett fordnderligt agrarsamhdlle. Vast sverige i jdmforande belysning (Goteborg: Humanistiska fakulteten, 1998), 83-228.
89. Gunnar Qvist, Kvinnofr&gan i Sverige 1809-1846. Studier rorande kvinnans ndringsfrihet inom de borgerliga yrkena (Goteborg: Gumperts, 1960), 115 ff.
90. Studier rorande kvinnans ndringsfrihet inom de borgerliga yrkena., 98, 129, 134, 164.
91. See also Janken Myrdal, “Jordbruk och jordagande. En aspekt av sambandet mellan agrarteknik och samhallsutveckling i aldre medeltid,” in Medeltidens fodelse, ed. Anders Andren (Lund: Gyllenstiernska Krapperupsstiftelsen, 1989), which discusses the same relationship for the period ca. 1000-1200. Whittle, “Individualism,” also stresses the availability of land as a factor that affects property practices (47).
92. Magnus Perlestam, Den rotfaste bonden-myt eller verklighet? Brukaransvar i Ramkvilla socken 1620-1820 (Lund, n.p., 1998), 164 f., 222 ff.
93. Maria Agren, Jord och gdld. Social skiktning och rattslig konflikt i sodra Dalarna ca 1650-1850 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1992), 226 ff. Some results from this study are presented in “Land and Debt: On the Process of Social Differentiation in Rural Sweden, circa 1750-1850 “ in Rural History 5 (1994): 2340; and in Iron-Making Societies. Early Industrial Development in Sweden and Russia, 1600-1900, ed. Maria Agren (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, Oxford, 1998), 156-62.