Mapping the Household State: Treatment of Disobedient Children in Early Modern Denmark and Sweden

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

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.