Abstract
This article offers a comparative analysis of the early modern Danish and Swedish Household state in relation to the treatment of “disobedient” children. It uses law codes and court records to explore the dynamic relationship between the household and state, arguing that contrasting patterns are apparent despite the common features of absolutism, agrarian, and mono-confessional Lutheranism. In Denmark, the state often responded to such cases by arrogating the power of the household and removing children from their care. In Sweden, the state upheld and sought to educate the household and relied upon parents to carry out appropriate chastisements of its junior members.
Introduction
Johan Henric Becker was what today would be called a troubled teen. In 1742, he was described by the authorities in Copenhagen as having led a “very indignant and reckless life in which he assaulted and scolded his parents, neighbours, and others, causing them injuries and harm in many ways.” 1 About twenty years earlier Ingeborg, a ten-year-old crofter’s daughter in the western part of Sweden, was characterised by the regional court as being “a very vicious girl, by nature prone to mischievousness.” 2 The behaviour of Johan and Ingeborg violated the early modern religious norms as well as the laws in their respective country. Therefore, it had caught the eye of the early modern authorities. Several local, regional and central institutions were engaged in the definition, investigation, and correction of their misdeeds. Now, their actions and the treatment of them has caught our eye, as historians who are interested in the norms, institutions, and practices shaping the interaction between the household, the state, and the church in early modern society.
Early modern states and society were permeated by religion, and ideas about the household were crucial, not least for the distribution of power. The fourth commandment and fatherly rule – be it in the realm, the congregation, or the family – was a cornerstone in the legitimation of early modern power relations in general. Thus, historians have studied the household from many perspectives. Research has investigated how gender roles and power structures in the household were influenced and maintained by religion, and how piety was lived and formed the life within the household. 3 Research has also examined how life in the households was regulated by the state through religiously based laws on marriage and sexual behaviour. 4 The idea of an orthodox, disciplining, and repressive state has often shaped this historiography. 5
Other scholars have pointed to the interaction between state and society; people used the courts to solve their everyday conflicts and the interactions and negotiations taking place in early modern courts have been regarded as constitutive of the early modern state. From this perspective the law was not only shaped by the interest of the state, but also by the experiences of the inhabitants, people who quarrelled with neighbours over debts, had problems in their marriages, or struggled to get decent pay from their employers. 6 The ideas of the household, in Lutheran areas especially the duties and rights of different household members spelled out in the Table of duties, were deeply integrated into these interactions, often used by both parties in a conflict, and by ordinary people as well as the representatives of the state. 7
To capture this, we introduce the concept of the household state. It highlights the basic early modern idea that all power in the world originates from God. The ultimate metaphor for legitimate authority was the father and at every level of society fatherly rule must be exercised in line with the teachings of the Bible. 8 There was a reciprocal dimension of all power relations which meant that the use of power could be criticised at risk of being redefined as abuse of power. All authorities answered to God and ideally, they all worked to maintain God’s order in the world. The early modern state was not only made up of thousands of individual households but the state itself was understood as a household.
This article aims to contribute to the discussion about political and social relations in early modern society, by investigating how moral and cultural expectations based on religious ideas about the household influenced the interaction between individuals, church, and state. Denmark and Sweden were strong early modern states in Protestant northern Europe, set apart from other countries by an exceptional integration of state and church. Thus, they are good examples of household states and constitute the case studies in this article. Children were – literally – the ones most exposed to fatherly rule. Therefore, the way children like Johan and Ingeborg were treated can unfold the practice of the household state. How were children considered disobedient dealt with and by whom? How were the responsibilities of the household state defined, practised, and shared between individual households, the church, and the state?
Early modern households were complex and differentiated units, consisting not only of parents and children but often also servants, masters, stepchildren and -parents as well as other relatives and sometimes even lodgers. 9 Our focus is on cases in which children were described as disobedient, a category used for children who broke moral and legal norms. These cases give us access to the expectations placed on the household authority to establish a Christian household as well as to the interaction between household, church, and state to re-establish the Christian household. The understanding of all authority as parental authority, building on the fourth commandment, makes the parent-child relationship a primary social relationship. 10 Thus, our study of disobedient children has implications for the understanding of the household state.
In this article, the practice of the household state is explored through a comparative analysis of court practices and regulations in Denmark and Sweden. We have chosen a few cases which are typical and representative of the pattern we see in our broader studies, and at the same time extraordinary detailed, allowing us to go into deep qualitative analysis. Some of the cases are brutal to a modern eye in their neglect, disbelief in the words of the children, and possible abuse of the children. Our focus is not on evaluating past treatment of these children. Instead, we want to understand why these children were categorised as disobedient, how they were handled and what this tells us about the interaction between household and state in the education of the king’s subjects.
Setting the Scene: Early Modern Denmark and Sweden
The two early modern kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden were strong, absolutist, military states on the geographical periphery of Europe. 11 That said, the political situation in Sweden differed from that of Denmark. Sweden had political representation for the clergy as well as for the nobility, the city burghers, and the peasants in the early modern Diet. In Denmark, the nobility had political representation from the Reformation until 1660, when absolutism was introduced. During the period of absolutism (1660–1848), all subjects were considered equal before the king and the law, and not even the nobility had any legal right to political representation or influence.
In Denmark, the Reformation meant the end of the church as an independent institution. 12 The Danish clergy lost all formal political power but became close legal and political advisors to the king and the local pastors had both religious and secular duties as civil servants of the king. In Sweden, the parish was, as the state, regarded as a household. The freeholding peasantry formed a parish meeting [sockenstämmor] and a parish board [kyrkoråd] with the pastor as its head. These authorities influenced local matters such as the building of churches and poor houses, poor relief, local order, and the choice of the clergy. They were closely linked to the state but have also been described as a form of local self-government. 13
Denmark and Sweden were also agrarian societies, however with slightly different structures. Denmark had larger manors than Sweden, covering more of the country, and the landlords had more power over their peasants than in Sweden. Settlements were much more scattered in Sweden which influenced both the formal and informal dynamics of local communities. 14 Both countries had local courts in towns and rural areas, supplemented with regional courts and a high court. In Denmark, large manors had courts in which the judges were appointed by the landlord. Research has stressed how the different courts were used by people to negotiate their rights, not least through settling cases outside of court. 15
Both Denmark and Sweden were characterised by mono-confessional Lutheranism and integration of the church into the state not seen elsewhere in early modern Europe. 16 In Denmark and Sweden, the Lutheran understanding of the household was embedded in the political ideology and social practice as the king, the pastor, and parents were supposed to uphold the order of God on earth. Their respective realms – the kingdom, the congregation, and the individual household – formed the bases for the religious regime, as well as for social and political order. 17
The religious commitment was strong in the constitutions of both countries. The Swedish constitution from 1634 stated, in its very first paragraph, that religious unity was the strongest foundation for a harmonious and lasting government and that the king, and all his servants and subjects, were to follow the word of God as it was explicated by Luther. 18 The first paragraph of the Danish constitution from 1665, the King’s Code, also obliged the king to “honour, serve and worship” God according to the Confession of Augsburg and to keep his subjects in the same faith. 19 The similarities are striking, but there is also a crucial difference in the distribution of responsibilities. In Sweden, where the estates had representation in the Diet, the constitution obliged the king, his subjects, and servants to follow the words of God, whereas the Danish constitution required the absolutist king to keep his subjects and servants in the right faith. Thus, based only on the introduction of the constitutions of the two countries, it seems as if the responsibility to ensure that the inhabitants of the country followed the words of God fell more heavily on the Danish king while it was more decentralised in Sweden.
In the next sections, we will take a closer look at the practice of shared authority and how the household state came to the fore in the treatment of disobedient children and regulations of the parent-child-relation in Denmark and Sweden. 20 We explore how authority was practised in the institutional landscape between household and state through examples from eighteenth-century court cases and the archives of tugt workhouses [tugt- og manufakturhus]. 21 The analysis of regulations focuses on the major Danish Law Code from 1683 and its comparable Swedish law from 1734. Both pieces of legislation replaced a diverse set of regional laws and established a uniform system of national law. We uncover and discuss obligations, duties, and rights given to household heads and their children respectively. Our approach is not to regard legislation as a set norm, and practice as a way to reveal how it “really was”. Instead, we regard legislation as well as courts, the church, prisons, and individual households as practice and as part of an institutional landscape operating to restore order. In line with this, the cases are introduced before and to a greater length than the laws. 22
The Practice of Shared Authority
Violent Children
In December 1729, a peasant called Jöns, his wife Kirstin, and Jöns' stepson were brought to a local court in Sweden by the local bailiff, accused of swearing, breaking the sabbath, neglecting church service, and, in the case of the son Anders, of having hit his stepfather with a spade. The household members were accused of being un-Christian, an accusation that probably originated from the pastor or the churchwardens. In eighteenth-century Sweden church discipline was often managed by the church and secular institutions in tandem. Sometimes, as in this case, people linked to the local church reported offences to the local bailiff [kronolänsmannen], who brought the matter to court. In many Swedish parishes, the church board and the parish meeting discussed matters of local order and identified people who behaved in a disorderly, i.e., un-Christian manner. Sometimes they imposed penalties on their parishioners and sometimes they forwarded the matter to the consistory of the regional diocese or the local court, as in the case of Jöns and his household. It might have been due to the seriousness of the committed offences and crimes committed in this case, but there were also huge local variations. 23
In this case, the serious accusation against Anders for violence against his stepfather was based on a complaint made by Jöns, his stepfather. In court, Jöns denied the allegations of un-Christian living, explaining that his wife had missed service one Sunday because she was sick. On another occasion, she had attended service while he had stayed at home caring for their small children. He also had explanations for the other small offences. The vital accusation was against Anders, who risked being sentenced to death. However, Jöns changed his testimony in court.
His new story was that he had come home on a Saturday, finding his wife, stepson, and maid already at home. In Jöns' opinion, they had left their work in the fields way too early, and therefore he scolded his wife. Her son, his stepson, talked back and asked him to let his mother be and then ran away, obviously scared of his stepfather's reaction. Jöns ran after him, but on the porch, he was injured by a spade to his forehead. At first, he said in court, he thought Anders had hit him with the spade, but after some reflection, he had realised that his stepson was innocent. The spade, stored on a beam over the door, had fallen when he aggressively banged the door behind him and as it fell it hit him in the forehead. Jöns' new story might be hard to believe, but the housemaid confirmed it. Both she and Jöns also stressed that the spade was placed so high that Anders, fourteen and small in stature, could not reach it. Furthermore, Jöns told the court that Anders had never before shown any stubbornness and that he, as his stepfather, had no reason to hold him responsible for his injury. So, even though Jöns had initiated the serious complaint against Anders, the court could do nothing but listen to his new story, confirmed by the witness, and acquit both Anders and the entire household of all charges. 24 Recent studies of violence and insults against parents in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Sweden have found that such crimes seldomly came before the court and even though the law was clear, the death penalty was rarely used. 25 The courts, and often also the parents, were creative in finding ways to reduce the crimes of children as was surely the case here. 26
In the summer of 1742, another boy, Johan Henric Becker, stood before the city court in the Danish town Odense. It was the county governor [stiftsamtmanden] who had raised charges against Johan at the request of the local pastor. Johan was accused of disrespectful language and physical violence toward his parents as well as for slandering them. He had also been in conflict with the neighbours. Apparently, an incident on Whitmonday had been the decisive factor for bringing the case to court. On their way to the morning service, the neighbours had witnessed a commotion within the house where Johan Becker lived with his parents. Johan and his father were fighting, and his mother ran for help. She was afraid that the two would kill each other. It clearly wasn’t the first time they had fought each other. The neighbours would also tell the court how Johan had once hit his mother with a stone so hard that she bled and that she had often shown them blue and yellow marks on her arms and told them her son had hit her. Johan had also been seen standing outside the house yelling at his father, and threatening to beat him up. According to the law, Johan should have been sentenced to death. However, that possibility was never discussed in the trial. Johan’s father also testified in court. He did not try to completely deny his son’s crimes, as Jöns' father had done, but he did argue that Johan’s violent and disrespectful behaviour was due to the “stupidity of youth” and claimed that his son had shown remorse.
The unwillingness to treat children’s violence against parents as a capital crime is apparent in the entire case. 27 Neither the pastor nor the county governor demanded or even suggested this penalty, even though it was quite evident from the witnesses that Johan had used physical violence against his parents. The county governor wanted to use the newly established tugt workhouse to have Johan re-educated or improved: “it has been thought best to send him to the tugt workhouse for a spell, if that could bring him to […] the right goal, which is, to bring him to improvement.” 28 Johan had had his confirmation (and thus knew the small catechism), but he needed to learn a craft, learn to work, and learn to behave.
However, the problem was not Johan alone. Most of all, the pastor and the county governor seemed to believe he needed to be removed from his parent’s household because they had not fulfilled their parental duty to raise him as a good Christian. They had been fighting and quarrelling themselves, and thus had not been acting as good examples or run a Christian household. Both the neighbours and the pastor himself told in court how the pastor had visited Johan’s house several times to try to convince the parents and the boy to live a more Christian life, without any effect. This was the role of the pastor according to the Danish Code, to guide disobedient children and married couples living an un-Christian life. 29 Unlike in Sweden, the church did not have any jurisdiction on its own in Denmark, and the pastor involved the secular authority when he gave up his efforts to improve the household. There was no direct charge made against the parents as heads of household as there had been in Sweden in the case of Anders. Instead, the institution of the tugt workhouse and a temporary termination of parental authority seemed to be the solution. 30 Johan’s father was the only witness from the household itself; in this case, the neighbours' description of the household seems to have been the decisive one.
Johan spent five years in the tugt workhouse. Before he was released, his parents promised to become more responsible household authorities in a petition to the King, but they also said they would put Johan into service in another household where he could learn a craft and continue his improvement. 31 When he was released, the county governor underlined that the important thing was for “the improvement that has begun to continue” and Johan was released “with the serious admonition that he corrects and improves and continues to live a proper life” – otherwise he would be placed in another prison workhouse for life. 32
Lying Children
In 1724 a ten-year-old girl, Ingeborg, puzzled the local court in Laske in the western part of Sweden. 33 On New Year’s Day, she was herding her master’s cattle in the woods and met Anders, in his late teens, who was herding his father’s cattle. According to Ingeborg, they first engaged in an indecent conversation, and after that, Anders threw her to the ground and raped her. In court, Ingeborg gave a very detailed description of the assault as well as of their dialogue. Despite being just a small child, she reported surprisingly many immodest words and expressions. Ingeborg’s master, married to her mother’s sister, told the court that Ingeborg’s clothes had been wet when she got back from the woods that day, but she (Ingeborg) denied that anything had happened. Eventually – under threat of punishment – she told her master and mistress that Anders had raped her. During the night she was in pain and, according to the master, her mistress examined her and concluded that she was injured.
In court, Anders categorically denied the charges. The court needed more information and decided that, after the ordinary court session, they would go to the cottage where Ingeborg lived to get a statement from her mistress who had just had a baby and could not come to court. Some of the lay judges came to the cottage before the others. Then and there Ingeborg told them that her previous story was a lie. When they cautioned her to tell the truth, she said that everything she had said in court was true. And then, once again, she took her story back. Whichever story she told, the little girl could, according to the men of the court, argue convincingly for it. She puzzled them.
It turned out that the girl was known for lying. Her mistress, who never confirmed that she found Ingeborg injured, described her as follows: “this girl is by nature so vicious that no one matches her when it comes to spinning lies, and neither discipline nor caution can deter her from it, as she has also repeatedly lied about me, which at times has complicated my marriage.” According to the local pastor, Ingeborg had a more than average knowledge of Christianity for her age. Consequently, she was in a position to know the difference between right and wrong, and between truth and lies. Nevertheless, when the court continued to interrogate her, she gave them more scandalous stories about indecent acts done by the children in the village. At this point the court stopped their interrogation, concluding that further questioning probably would create more evil than good. They freed Anders and sentenced Ingeborg to be birched by her mother in the presence of a local bailiff. As the case involved a capital crime (rape), it automatically went to the court of appeal. There, the rape accusation was regarded as an attempt by Ingeborg to divert her master’s interest from the fact that she lost a cow in the forest, and it was stressed that Ingeborg, only ten years old, had proven to be remarkably prone to all kinds of vices. Therefore, and to set an example, her punishment was sharpened: she was to be birched by the executioner and then educated by the pastors so that she understood the seriousness of her crime.
Like Johan, Ingeborg had misbehaved in the eyes of the authorities. Johan had been disrespectful toward his parents and been in conflict with his neighbours - he had broken the fourth commandment. Even though the court at first took Ingeborg’s rape narrative seriously, it ended up seeing it as a false accusation and concluded that she had made life difficult for her employer with her fabricated stories. She had shown disrespect both toward her parents and toward her current master and mistress through her lies. In both cases, the courts decided that the children needed correction. In Johan’s case, it meant that he was separated from his parents, whose education had failed according to the court. He was sent to the tugt workhouse to get a better education and he stayed there for several years. In Ingeborg’s case, the lower court appointed her mother to perform her punishment. However, it was to be done in the bailiff’s presence, suggesting that the court did not trust her to do the task properly. The sentence from the court of appeal signaled even more mistrust in the mother and ordered a more severe punishment: being birched by the executioner was much more shameful than being birched by parents. It is worth noting, though, that nothing was said about Ingeborg’s upbringing or the role of her parents.
The Punishment of Children
Children regarded as having misbehaved were handled in different ways in Denmark and Sweden, even though the countries had a common goal (that people be good subjects and live Christian lives) as well as a common ideological underpinning. In Denmark, the tugt workhouse stood in for parents who had failed. 34 In Sweden, where disciplining institutions were very rare, the court could let the parents execute the court’s punishment, even though they had failed in bringing up the child. However, when the court prescribed parents to birch or chastise their children, it should also be seen as a reprimand directed toward the parents. 35 The state, through its courts, got involved in their parenting, giving them orders as to what to do. In this way, the Swedish state sought to educate the parents, while the Danish took over the parental responsibility to ensure the education of the subjects and to make an example. 36
Neighbours also seemed to play a different role. In Denmark, the density of housing was higher than in Sweden, not only in towns like Odense but also in rural areas. This has been pointed to as part of the explanation for the weaker position of the household and the master of the household in Denmark in comparison with Sweden. Pastors and schools for example played a more significant role in the education of children in Denmark. 37 Neighbours were more apparent as an instrument of social control in the case of Johan, a Dane, whereas the pastors seem to have played similar roles in both countries; they transferred matters from church discipline to secular authorities, testified about the characters of people, and assisted different authorities with other information and services.
Examples like these can be multiplied. 38 In a case from Dalecarlia in Sweden in 1737, a father and his underaged son were accused of pilfering. The boy, eleven years old, admitted that he had stolen money and jewellery from the homes of several people. The father, suspected of being involved in the crime, had tried to give back some of the stolen items to the victims but in the end, the father was fined for pilfering, and the boy – who, according to the court had shown great viciousness – was sentenced to appropriate birching, to be administered by his father in the presence of a bailiff. 39 The court defined the father as a criminal, nevertheless, they made him administer the boy’s punishment. The presence of the bailiff was a requirement as the authorities had to make sure that the father executed their verdict.
In 1756 Jens Bryde approached the poor committee in Copenhagen to have his sister’s daughter, Kirsten Thorsdatter, released from the tugt workhouse. 40 Kirsten had been in prison and the workhouse since 1753 when she arrived together with her mother, Karen Thors from Vodingborg. Her mother had led Kirsten into drinking and other vices. Therefore, Kirsten was placed in the institution. During her stay, she had been good-natured and willing both to apply herself to religious lessons, childhood teaching, and to do the work she was told to do. She had thus improved in the care of the institution, detached from her mother’s authority. Her good behaviour and improvement were used as arguments to release her to stay in her uncle’s household. He also promised to keep her away from begging and idleness as well as to continue her Christian education and ensure her confirmation. Eventually, he had her released. 41 Her mother’s fate is unknown. Once she was judged responsible for her daughter’s bad behaviour, the authorities took over, and when the daughter had improved, she was released to another household authority, who promised to continue the improvement. Kirsten was not released to her mother, who was not told to punish her daughter either, which is a considerable contrast to the way the Swedish court in Dalecarlia let a thieving son stay with his criminal father.
A number of different local and regional authorities were mobilised in handling the cases involving children regarded as disobedient. In Johan Henric Becker’s case - and Danish cases in general - the pastor played an important role, first as the one who tried to talk sense into the household members, but if this did not work, he was the one who approached secular authorities to bring the case to court. In addition, the pastor almost always testified to the misbehaviour of the children, especially when they were brought to the tugt workhouse on summary judgement. Furthermore, the county governor was involved as the local authority responsible for charging misconduct at the local courts. The inspectors of the prison and workhouse, as well as the poor committee in Copenhagen, were the authorities who received the children. Finally, the king and his central administration became involved in Johan’s case because his father petitioned the king to have him released. As the petitioner and the authority figure closest to Johan, his father and mother were also among the many authorities tasked with treating the disobedience of children.
In Sweden in general and in the few cases referred to above, several local and regional authorities could be involved in the handling of disobedient children. In Ingeborg’s case, her accusation against Anders was first handled by her mother. When she heard about the alleged crime, she went to Anders' home and confronted him with the accusation, in the presence of his father. The father scolded him, but Anders proclaimed his innocence. In court, the king’s bailiff acted as a prosecutor, but nothing was said about how the matter came to their notice. Maybe Ingeborg’s mother had reported the crime, but it could also have come from the pastor if he had heard about it, or from a rumour. Through the trial, the lay judges, the legal officials, the pastor, the court of appeal, and the executioner became involved in the matter. In the case of Jöns and Anders, the local bailiff (länsman) acted as prosecutor. The documentation does not say anything about the origins of the accusations, but probably they came from the local pastor. It may also have come from the local parish meeting (sockenstämman), which had a vaguely worded responsibility for church discipline and some other aspects of the local order. 42
Hence, a child who misbehaved could mobilise an institutional landscape made up of a wide range of local, regional, and central institutions, acting and interacting when the local order was disturbed. To be a good Christian was to be honest, diligent, and obey the orders of superiors and these norms were upheld by the church and secular authorities in tandem. Even though the main responsibility rested on the parents, the upbringing of children was far from a private matter. In practice, the power and care of the symbolic father were shared and negotiated among many practical fathers, including both fathers and mothers, masters and mistresses, pastors, local and central judges, and administrators and the kings as legislators and guarantors of order in their realms.
Household Relations in Legislation
The legal treatment of children who were disobedient towards their parents and committed crimes or offences rested on the laws and they were, in turn, shaped by religion. This section focuses on how the Danish and Swedish legislation distributed authority over children between different institutions in the household state. What was the responsibility of the parents? How were criminal and offensive children to be punished? Who should punish them?
The order of the household was a recurring theme in both the Danish and the Swedish law codes. The married couple was, as head of their household, obliged to govern and control the behaviour of children and servants, and their authority was stipulated by law. 43 The Danish code from 1683 urged parents to serve as good examples and to ensure a Christian life in their household. 44 In the case of Johan, described above, his parents obviously did not live up to these standards. Parents and masters were also required not to curse and swear themselves, to keep children and servants from doing so, and to keep their children in school and honest work. 45 Everybody should honour holy days and go to church; otherwise, they would be punished for sacrilege. 46 Parents and masters would make sure that their children and servants attended church service and were forbidden to keep them away from church with work. After service young people (whether servants or children) should stay in church to learn their childhood teaching (catechism). 47 If they made trouble and noise in the cemetery during the sermon, they should be punished by birching or whipping by a local authority. If the parents did not prevent them from being boisterous, they were punished for sacrilege. 48 To uphold order in the household and avoid the dishonouring of God, parents were allowed to set up a “house-punishment” [husstraf] for cursing and swearing. 49 If they treated each other in an un-Christian way themselves both husband and wife could be sent to the tugt workhouse. 50 In towns, local authorities [overformynderi] were established to keep both parents and children under surveillance and they had, as illustrated in the cases of Johan and Kirsten, the power to interfere if children were not raised properly. 51 If they were not, the local authorities should remove the children from the household and place them in service or apprenticeship, i.e., move them to another household.
The Swedish 1734 law did not say anything comparable to the Danish law about the overall obligation for parents to care for and give their children a Christian upbringing but it criminalized roughly the same things. It stipulated punishments for people cursing and swearing, especially if it happened in church, in court, or in other public places. If children were caught swearing, they were to be chastised by their parents or masters, and parents were fined if they neglected such correction. 52 According to the 1686 church law parents were also responsible for sending their children and servants to visitation (husförhör) 53 and pastors should instruct parents to let their children learn Christian basics and to read. 54 In Sweden, the individual household was regarded as an educational institution with the household heads as potential teachers. Sometimes they performed this role themselves, but they could also arrange parish schools for children and hire teachers. 55 Royal decrees stated that everyone had to honour the sabbath and go to church on Sundays and as we know from the case of Jöns and Anders the rules could be upheld by the local courts. The decrees also emphasised that parents had to teach their children to read and obliged parents, masters, mistresses, and others in authority to lead by example and make sure that their subordinates attended service. 56 If parents failed to do that, or if their children were making noise outside the church, they were fined and obliged to chastise their children. 57 A range of crimes (swearing, violence, manslaughter, and theft) committed by underaged children (7–15 years) outside of the household were, by law, to be punished by birching, and executed by their parents. Usually, it was to take place in their homes, with or without the presence of representatives from local authorities, or – for more severe or repeated crimes – by the door to the courthouse. 58 If the parents were not around, the punishment should be executed by another relative. 59 A harsher and rare alternative, used by the upper court in Ingeborg’s case, was to let the executioner do the birching.
By structure and language, the religious foundation of the law was more visible in the Danish Code. 60 One of the articles about children’s offences against parents can serve as an example. It said: “If someone is found to disobey their parents and despise their Christian instructions to fear God and be honest, pious, peaceful, diligent, frugal and the like, and that can be proven, they shall lose their parental inheritance.” 61 The Swedish law was stricter in its language. 62 For instance, the words on children who insulted their parents were: “If children give their parents insulting remarks, they shall be punished with…” 63 The Swedish law also aimed to uphold religious values but did not use the same religious rhetoric as the Danish law.
The fourth commandment (to honour your father and mother) is reflected in the laws. In the Danish code, one of the chapters in the book on misdeeds started with the paragraph cited above stating that children should live according to their Christian upbringing or risk being disinherited. 64 Inheritance is a sign of kinship, and disinheriting could be understood as an annulment of kinship. The second paragraph said that children who used offensive language to or about their parents should lose inheritance but also be sentenced to prison and workhouse for the rest of their life, i.e., social exclusion from society. 65 The third paragraph stated that children who hit their parents should be beheaded. 66
The Swedish 1734 law devoted a chapter in the section on misdeeds to “manslaughter of parents, children or wife, and if someone beats, or insults their parents.” 67 The first paragraph stated that any member of a nuclear family who killed another family member was to be beheaded. Children who hit their parents were to be beheaded, whipped, or imprisoned on water and bread for thirty days. If children insulted their parents, they should be whipped or imprisoned on water and bread for twenty days. 68 For all these crimes the guilty party had to publicly apologise to the offended. In Sweden the punishment was aimed at reintegration of the children through physical punishment and public apology, whereas punishment of children in Denmark usually meant exclusion from the family.
In Denmark, parents – both fathers and mothers – had an explicit right to chastise their children, but this was not an unlimited right to use violence. Parents could chastise their children with sticks or rope, but not with weapons, and if they broke their bones or harmed them permanently, they were to be punished as if they had done it towards a stranger. 69 Thus, in the Danish case, the special rights of the parents within the household were dissolved if the line between legitimate chastisement and illegitimate violence was crossed. The Swedish law did not explicitly give parents the right to punish their children physically, but it was assumed since the law stipulated that parents who chastised their children “so roughly that they died”, were to pay half or a similar fine to other accidental homicides, depending on the circumstances in the case. 70 Another article said that parents who killed their children by mistake should pay half a fine compared to accidental homicides outside the household. 71 According to both Swedish and Danish law parents were supposed to chastise their children, but in moderation. While Danish parents were punished as if they had harmed a stranger if the child were marked for life by their chastisement; Swedish filicides were assessed at half the fine of a stranger-killing.
To conclude, Scandinavian legislation placed the main responsibility for the order in households on the household heads – fathers, mothers, masters, and mistresses – and in that role, they were supposed to teach and control their children and other subordinates. Thus, in relation to children and servants the fatherly rule of the house was not an exclusive privilege of the male head of household, but a joint duty of the married couple. 72 If they failed, they could be corrected by other local authorities, such as the pastors and the local courts, and in Danish towns, the overformynderi. Parents could use chastisement as an educational tool and maintain order, but their use of violence was limited by the law. Thus, the legislation also provided support for the control of the parents; they were not supposed to abuse their authority. Nevertheless, in Sweden, parental violence could be understood as a legitimate correction gone wrong, even though it was fatal. Such parents were still to be judged in relation to their parental role and not as if the victim had been a stranger (which was the case in Denmark). In this respect, household relations seemed to be more influential in the Swedish case than in the Danish. The household added an extra layer of importance to the crime in Sweden, whereas the boundary between the household and the rest of society was dissolved in Denmark if anyone – child or parent – stepped outside the set norms.
Conclusion
In this article, we have tried to map some aspects of the early modern household state. Through a comparative study of how authority and social responsibilities were played out in relation to disobedient children in law and legal practice in Denmark and Sweden, we have discussed similarities and differences in expectations placed on the household, as well as how the order was restored when broken. In practice, the household state was implemented through a net of complementary and overlapping institutions including individual households, the church, secular courts, and the state apparatus. Authority was (unevenly) shared and exercised in a constant negotiation between parents, masters, pastors, court officials, civil servants, the central state apparatus, the king, and the law.
The analogy between the early modern family/household and the state forms a strong model in research, underlining the patriarchal character of both. Although this was a common feature in early modern Europe, our study points to the importance of not taking e.g., German, French, or British models of households and institutional landscapes for granted, but to do empirical investigations of concrete practices (including legislation as a practice) and to take seriously the nuances and details revealed. Even in two very similar mono-confessional Lutheran monarchies as Sweden and Denmark, we find crucial differences in the institutionalisation of their common religious underpinning.
Before discussing these differences, some things need to be said about similarities. Both in Denmark and Sweden, the duties of the heads of individual households (to make sure that the household members lived a Christian life, to take care of their education, etc.) were stressed together with rights (e.g., to chastise children) but limitations of those rights were also spelled out in the laws. Furthermore, the authority of the individual household, over children and servants, was most often not gendered. The Danish Code and the Swedish laws explicitly addressed both fathers and mothers in most of their articles on household relations, and very few distinctions were drawn between men and women as household heads. In court cases, we also find mothers as well as fathers performing household authority in different contexts. 73 Thus, early modern mothers and mistresses were also heads of households. On the other hand, it is important to note that women’s authority was closely linked to the household; only there could they exercise authority with respect to children and servants. Women did not have the possibility to (formally) partake in the authority of other local, regional, or central institutions.
No one in the legal spheres studied here questioned the religious and legal norms to honour and obey parents. However, Denmark and Sweden had different approaches when children acted against the norms. Our studies show that the Swedish state (its laws, legal practice, and institutional landscape) both leaned on and protected individual households to a higher degree than the Danish. The inner relations of the household, especially the authority of the household heads, were protected in Sweden by severe punishments compared to similar offences committed outside the household. For most crimes and offences against household authority, the guilty party was supposed to apologise and Swedish children were very seldom removed from their households. Additionally, Swedish courts often ordered the parents of minors who had committed crimes to administer their punishments. In contrast, Danish children who had been disobedient or committed crimes were typically removed from their households. Local authorities not only administered their punishment but also often took over the responsibility for their upbringing from their parents. In Denmark, disobedient children were regarded as a sign of failure for the household. The felt need to place children in other institutions also promoted the growth of tugt workhouses in Denmark in the eighteenth century. Such establishments existed in Sweden as well but they did not serve the same purpose as in the Danish institutional landscape. 74
So, serving the same goal – to uphold state power and moral order – the two states relied on and developed slightly different institutional landscapes. Swedish political institutions protected the individual household as a strong corporation in a somewhat more complex political landscape, while absolutist rule in Denmark created a system in which different institutions stood in for each other to uphold the order. The purpose of the Swedish law seemed to be to uphold the individual household as a central institution in society, while the purpose in Denmark seemed to be to support the king in his efforts to uphold the religious order even if that sometimes meant that the rights and duties of individual households were circumvented.
Thus, the Swedish household state was a state made up of strong individual households, supported by the state. Probably, this was related to the strong position of Swedish peasants and the existence of a plethora of institutions in which they (and the burghers in towns) had representation. Local courts, parish meetings, and parish boards were, as well as the Diet and the individual household, shaped by a culture of self-government and self-regulation. In this institutional landscape, authority was shared in complex ways; household heads on different levels could stand in for, but also contest, each other. The Danish household state was a state in which the state authorities more directly substituted for household authorities, likely reflecting the absolutist rule of the king and the Danish structure of land ownership. Authority was upheld by a range of institutions but the mix of authority rested more heavily on the state and the king as the most powerful as well as the most responsible household head.
Early modern households were embedded in a wider institutional landscape. The comparison between Denmark and Sweden has deepened and nuanced our picture of the specific mix of authorities mobilized to uphold order in two early modern Lutheran states. However, disobedient children were not a problem unique to Lutheran countries. Even though the household – as an idea and institution – was a cornerstone of the state in many European countries, the way these ideas and institutions were put into practice varied. Therefore, questions about how the state as a household dealt with problems in other households may serve as a starting point for comparative studies.
In the legal cases investigated in this article, state power was represented by a number of civil servants and members of the civil society; county governors, inspectors, professional and lay judges, bailiffs, pastors, mothers and fathers, neighbours, and others played a role in our cases with children defined as disobedient. We find both collaboration and disagreement between these actors, as they participated in an ongoing negotiation about how the idea of the household was to be put into practice. The household state was a result of these micro-level practices and negotiations. They linked together the politics of the state with the fate of children such as Johan and Ingeborg.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, (grant number P17-0066:1).
