Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 293

The structure of agrarian society and social differentiation are venerable themes in rural history. Yet, despite a wealth of work from the very grand scale to local village studies, our knowledge of these issues is still patchy. It is particularly the case that much work on Scandinavia tends to be squeezed out of debates organized around ‘ideal types’ based on southern England, the Netherlands, and east Elbian Europe. To fill in some gaps, historians are well advised to read Jonas Lindström’s excellent work, which approaches the issue of stratification in peasant society with admirable theoretical and linguistic clarity. It should be consulted by anyone interested in pre-modern agrarian society, landholding, and kinship relations.

The volume is a doctoral thesis employing excellent records from the central Swedish parish of Björskog, largely parish registers, land and livestock surveys, and tax assessments from the 1640s, 1713 and 1810. Before discussion of Lindström’s results, some caveats are in order. He only examines peasant stratification, that is, the distribution of wealth in various forms among landholders. This might be justified by the limitations of the sources, especially as longitudinal studies of landholding kin are a key ingredient of his research. But forms of peasant stratification can only be understood in the context of the wider labour market. By the end of the study period, ‘peasants’ made up only just over half of households in the parish. This is thus not a study of social stratification more widely. At times, particular sources are pushed to their very limits and beyond, such as with the parish’s probate inventories, whose coverage of even the landed population varies considerably over time, and can thus tell us little about changing relative wealth. Lindström’s very specific focus on differentiation also leads him to use relative rather than absolute measures, which say something about distribution, but nothing about the actual experience of being at different points on the distribution. Most of the study is based on the examination of quartiles, but as these quartiles are drawn from different measures in different sources at different dates, the possibility of comparison is sometimes weak.

There are nevertheless plenty of rich pickings, only a few of which can be covered here. Swedish land was owned by nobles and institutions, the Crown or as freehold. The latter was subject to a land tax that Lindström sees as a form of feudal tenure and it is thanks to this that source coverage of landholding in Björskog can be complete. By the 1810s we learn the salutary lesson for studies in other parts of the continent that the great majority of landholdings comprised a mix of owner-occupied and leased land. Rights of inheritance were generally strong and partible, but the Crown gave a right of redemption to one heir, leading to a common pattern that heirs paid off kin and became indebted earlier in life, and then paid off their debts by their fifties. Stratification was not Chayanovian and linked to the life-cycle, and family labour shortages were smoothed over by a wider labour market.

Over the whole period differentiation among peasants changed little but, especially following national policy during the eighteenth century, fixed rents led to a great decline in real burdens on Crown and freehold land. Households tended to respond to fortune by creating new local households rather than investment and accumulation, inevitably leading to quite high rates of downward mobility. Lindström’s ability to trace the dynamics of kin relations and property devolution over time is one of the great strengths of his work. Demographic behaviour was no different among wealth groups, but the children of the wealthy had better access to land, and were more likely to stay. This led to an eighteenth-century paradox: lessening availability of land as population grew, but cheap rents. Increasingly, family ties became more important as a route to landholding, especially through marriage. Patrilineal descent was rare but land usually stayed within wider family, with an increasing but by no means overwhelming share of transfers to close kin. Lindström finds, as others in Europe have, a strongly segmented land market with some holdings being highly stable, with family members succeeding each other, while others had a high turnover of short-term residents. But over time the family-land bond became greater. In 1713 less than third of poorest quartile of landholders inherited their land, but by 1810 some 80 per cent did.

Comprehension of these dynamics also uncovers a notable issue in how we view the peasant community and attachment to the land. Looking retrospectively, these ties seem very strong. Eighty-three per cent of those holding land in 1810 descended from people who held land in 1713, and 80 per cent of peasants had at least one ancestor from among a sample of 25 peasants present in 1641! But if we look ‘forward’, disappearance rates are high: only 56 per cent of landholders in 1713 had descendants in 1810. This sheds important light on the nature of village communities. Because of the greater propensity of the poor to leave, those with ancestors in the village were increasingly likely to be descended from the rich, whatever their own social position, leaving a dense network of ties to wealthy peasants. Given this, the poor unsurprisingly came from both rich and poor backgrounds. High turnover was thus quite compatible with dense kin networks and long-standing community ties.

Lindstrom’s thesis is structured around tests of some of the traditional narratives of agrarian society. It is always easier to reject old hypotheses than to secure new ones, and the Björskog case does not fit these analyses well: he provides no new magic bullet to explain agricultural progress or stagnation. But in their wake, he leaves much to intrigue the reader and promising lines of inquiry for others to pursue.