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Historisk tidskrift 126:4 • 2006

Innehåll (Contents) 2006:4

Uppsatser (Articles)

Okänd bonde. Den mångskiftande bondebilden från senmedeltid till modern tid

Kimmo Katajala

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

The unknown peasant. The manifold faces of the peasantry from the middle ages to modern times

In contrast to the Continental peasant, the Scandinavian peasant was typically a freeholder. Nowhere in Scandinavia did there exist anything resembling Continental serfdom. But there was nonetheless significant variations in the status of the peasant over time and between the Scandinavian realms.

In Sweden (including present-day Finland) the peasants formed one of the four estates and were represented at the Diet. However, it was a heterogeneous group. Only the freeholders and crown tenants had the right to appoint representatives to the Diet. Peasants who held their land under manorial estates were assumed to be represented by their landlords. Cottagers, farmhands and other people who earned their living in the countryside but did not own land, did not possess any political rights.

Outside the political sphere, other, often pejorative, definitions of the peasantry existed. This was true in the whole of Scandinavia, but was most pronounced in Danish literary sources. For the Danish eighteenth-century nobility and clergy, the peasant appeared lazy, drunk, unreliable, devoid of any sense of honour and driven by instincts rather than sense. The peasant was unable to see beyond his basic needs and lacked any concept of the common good. He was given characteristics that were the complete opposite of the nobility’s ideal virtues. The peasant was defined by his clothing, his speech and his manners. In every way he differed from the gentry.

The national movements of the nineteenth century changed the image of the peasant radically. He was now portrayed as the economic and ideological cornerstone of the Nordic national states. This change in attitude can be seen most clearly in Finland, the only Nordic country that gained its independence through a civil war. The nineteenth-century Finnish national movement was based on the support of the higher strata of the peasantry. In the Civil War of 1918, the nation was divided between patriotic Whites, consisting of the educated upper class and the better off peasantry, and the socialist Reds, supported by the workers and the cottagers.

The Reds lost the war and the White peasantry rose to the political and ideological leadership of the young republic in the and 1930’s. From now on, the Other in the countryside was represented by the cottagers and the common folk. In the literature they were often presented as lazy, unreliable petty criminals: the very same epithets ascribed to the early modern peasantry. Only after the Second World War was the Finnish commonality rehabilitated. Only then was it possible to create such literary figures as the brave but stubborn soldier Antti Rokka, a cottager from Karelia and the hero of Väinö Linna’s beloved novel The unknown soldier (1954).

Keywords

peasants, peasantry, social history, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Finnish literature