Crown Whims and Farmers Endurance

Militarization, Over-Taxation and Farmers Resistance in Denmark-Norway, 1500-1800

1 1500-1800 Peter Mikhail Makhno

Crown Whims and Farmers Endurance

Militarization, Over-Taxation and Farmers Resistance in DenmarkNorway, 1500-1800

Peter Mikhail Makhno

Nisus Publishing
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Copyright: Nisus Publishing, 2014 nisus2014@gmail.com

ISBN 97882 91612 171

Contents:
Introduction, page 5 Rural populations versus continental fiefs, page 7 Early peasant revolts, page 9 The Reformation and its consequences, page 14 State power and capital versus confederal ties and basic staple values, page 29 The new agenda of the Enlightenment, page 47 Popular organization and direct action in the Age of Democratic Revolution, page 55 The Great French Revolution in Norway, page 77 Lofthus fate and the Aftermath of the Great Fren ch Revolution, page 79 Conclusion: The position of the yeomanry by the end of the 18th century, page 88 Notes, page 94

Introduction For all their less favorable legacy of plunder, conquest and bloodshed duly exaggerated by their victims and hardly more brutal than for example the mass slaughtering of Saxon people (even women and children) by Charlemagnes army in the 8th century the Vikings left a heritage of so-called farmers legalism (legislation by the public), which has always been one of the crucial pillars of republicanism as against autocratic, monarchical power seen in a universal perspective. At the height of the Norse republican era in the 10th century, there even existed well functioning confederacies, most notably along the Western coast of Norway, encompassing the vast regions from the Sola area (Stavanger) to the Lofoten peninsula, defying kingly power both from without and within, and maintaining its coordinating institution, Gulatinget, for dealing with economical and political issues.1 However, with the rise of monotheism and Christianity in the north, the Norse republican structures and institutions were lost, and centralized monarchical states with their notions of political power as derived from god set the scene for subsequent developments, removing the age old farmers legalism to the sphere of lofty revolutionary claims to be raised in rare moments of social and economical
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upheaval. The more political and economic centralization became the order of the day, the more incomprehensible and utopian did the democratic and confederal notions appear to ordinary men and women indeed, they were even largely lost to modern historians so that in revolutionary times, as for example during The American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century, as well as the Paris Commune of 1871, the once real and well functioning principles had to be reinvented and elaborated anew under those quite different cultural circumstances. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Nordic countries experienced the same overall process towards centralization of power and growth of the state, at the expense of independent rural regions and their confederate organization, which we see in the rest of Europe the main exceptions of decentralization being the Swiss confederacy, the Hanseatic League, the Lombard league, and the stubborn independence of the Flemish cities, such as Ghent and Bruges. The governing principle in the Danish-Norwegian dual monarchy in the 15th to the early 19th century, came to be most decisively influenced by the English and French monarchies fluctuating between the rudimentary parliamentarian British variety (cf. Magna Carta, 1215) and the autocratic form of the French centralized state from the times of Charlemagne onwards, both of which were challenged by
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popular revolutions in the modern era, in the 1640s and 1780s respectively. Rural populations versus continental fiefs In the course of the first century after the establishment of the Kalmar Union among the Scandinavian kingdoms in 1397, the local administration of the Danish court had led to the influx of a great number of Danish and German fiefs and their control over the Norwegian peasantry, who had a long legacy of independence behind them, and were ill prepared to tolerate any introduction of feudal structures. The new rule of the fiefs often involved a kind of exploitation and oppression previously unknown in the area which, as already noted, had been accustomed to an elaborate system of freedom among the farmers which dated all the way back to the Viking era. In Norway, the rule of the kings fiefs from the 14th and 15th centuries onwards, implied an unprecedented state authoritarianism, and the new civil servants of the court brought with them attitudes and forms of conduct towards the farmers which repeatedly aroused fierce resistance among the commoners. The former were, for example, in a position to issue unfair fines, confiscate landed property, pay annoying visits, and persecute men as well as women in the increasingly intense witch hunts which escalated in the 16th century.
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Apart from their tendency to exploit the Northern farmers who were mostly peasants in that age through increasing the land rents, issuing excessive fees, and at times manipulating the taxes, the feudally oriented German fiefs imported to traditionally yeoman dominated regions in the North, also brought with them the notion of the nobilitys game rights including claims to such wild life resources such as inland fish, most importantly trout and salmon. These infringements on deep seated natural human rights were fought through centuries by continental peasants, who largely depended upon wild life food resources in periods of ill-harvest, and they were no more welcome when tentatively introduced in the peripheral Scandinavian regions. Illustratively, in many districts the expanding mining operations in the North, largely conducted by these very same Germans or their relatives, tended to be preferred at sites converging with rich inland fisheries such as the silver mining operations and salmon fisheries at Kongsberg, and the iron works and rich trout resources in Telemark. The very essence of the social struggle in this era is, as it were, extracted in the problem complex of exploited peasants and an alert minority of yeomen, who considered the inland fisheries as their very life guarantee during failing harvests of equal importance compared to the situation along the coast among a frugal and largely self-subsisting rural population, while it was
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about to be usurped as a source of luxury and additional profit for the encroaching fiefs. Indeed, to this very day inland fisheries have a poor reputation in many parts of the Northern regions, especially in districts where they were overtaken by these proto-capitalists at an early stage in the foreign hegemony. And, most significantly, the most well known early modern peasant revolts virtually all occurred in inland districts where mining was conducted, and game and inland fish resources were abundant, only to be crushed by ruthless persecutions and torturous deaths testifying to a process of power demonstration and economic accumulation which, in our time, has been perpetuated into a senile stage seen in a global context, under the name of land grabbing in the Global South.

Early peasant revolts The resistance among the farmers has been extensively discussed by, among others, the Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht, in his classic work, Norsk Bondereising.2 In this work, Koht mentions previous to the numerous rebellions in the early modern era the resistance against the fief, Herman Molteke in the 1420s. Molteke was a German nobleman who had married into a prominent Norwegian family, and became a tax gatherer in his
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region, only to attract the wrath of the peasants because of too heavy tax demands and other harassment. After several supplications by the farmers to the king in Copenhagen, Molteke was displaced to a similar position in another part of the country, in which he appears to have evoked no further consternation. Another, and more dramatic, instance is the rising among the farmers of Telemark under the leadership of Hallvard Graatopp in the late 1430s, who were forerunners for the intensive period between 1490 and 1540 as far as peasant risings is concerned. According to Koht, these peasants rose against the clergy and the knighthood, and their rebellion encompassed commoners from the whole county of Telemark in the south-eastern part of Norway. Once more it was a tax gatherer, Herlaug Pedersson, who aroused the peasants anger, after which they roamed the country all the way to the administrative centre of Akershus near Oslo, plundering and bullying the nobility as they went along. Koht tells us that everywhere they went, the commoners joined them, which indicates that the grievances were quite widespread as regards the conduct of the kings officials and the growing centralization of the state apparatus. However, Graatopp and his furious hordes were defeated and sentenced to pay heavy fines for their disobedience and tumults, and some of them even got their entire farmsteads confiscated by the crowns representatives.
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Then, in the 1490s the peasant rebellions really took off, coinciding with the increasing tensions of the Reformation era. In 1496, the farmers killed the fief, Arald Kane, and several of his men, in a pitched battle over the attempts by the authorities to take away peasant property and inheritance rights in some specific instances. The year after, in 1497, the fief Knut Alvssons taxman, Lasse Skiold was assassinated by the furious farmers. Afterwards, a certain number of peasants took sides with the above mentioned Alvsson in his rebellion against another of the Kings servants, the fief Henrik Krummedike, in Bohuslen, who represented an even more authoritarian, and feudal, tradition with its links to the European continent. Then, in 1508, a peasant named Herlog Hudfat rose with his followers against Duke Christians (viceroy) heavy handed and formally illegal tax policies. The rising was crushed and its leaders executed. In 1518, there were peasant revolts all over the country against Christian IIs heavy taxation, issued to finance his wars; needless to say, the revolts were crushed with immense brutality. Renewed peasant resistance occurred in the 1520s against the fief, Hans Mule, who had been campaigning against and prosecuted pilgrims. Christian II, who obviously liked to think of himself as an innovator, had deprived the Norwegian clergy of their judicial power and right to engage in trade

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(1521) as signs of the Reformation turmoil to arrive in Denmark-Norway. In the county of Telemark, the new burdens and work duties leveled upon the farmers in connection with the newly established ironwork in Seljord, resulted in massive protests, in 1537, from the downtrodden poor. The revolting peasants armed themselves, were joined by peasants from the neighboring districts, and prepared for armed engagement with the royal forces. However, the leaders of the rising were executed after being trapped by the authorities into what they were promised as negotiations. In Setesdal, bordering to western Telemark, in 1540, a band of farmers gathered in the old faith in the coming of an army of Huns, which was supposed to come from the North and throw all kinds of authority away. This occurred four years after the Reformation was introduced in Norway, in which the Norwegian national council (riksraad) was formally abolished by the Danish king. Formally, Norway was henceforward reduced to a province of Denmark, and the court had taken over the immense landed properties formerly owned by the Church, to the extent that it, at that stage, possessed 50 percent of the land. The abolition of the Norwegian national council was to leave a huge impact on the socio-political organization, resulting for example in a considerable deterioration of the Norwegian language and, accordingly, communication problems
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between the Danish speaking authorities entering the country in increasing numbers on the one hand, and the downtrodden and largely illiterate commoners on the other. This situation may well have reinforced the intensity of the peasant revolts, according to the ancient Greek dictum Where reason ends, violence begins. Most likely, it also influenced the witch hunts raging around the country as elsewhere in Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, causing even men and women practicing age old medicinal techniques to be burned as devil worshippers.3 The intolerance of the new religious creed most certainly embittered the fronts between the authorities and the commoners, while at the same time putting an unprecedented premium on obedience towards the state magistrates. The combination of increasing tax pressures and invention of new technologies, such as the water powered saw mills, spurred on by the protestant work ethic, urged the peasants to turn to lumbering and small scale wooden industries to compensate for their gradually reduced position within agriculture which had always been a precarious occupation in the northernmost parts of Europe and for a century or so they enjoyed the fruits of this additional economic activity. This fitted well with the overall versatile orientation of these peasants, which had a long standing cultural legacy and comes naturally with the relatively short growth season at their latitudes.
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The economic freedom of the peasants to utilize the timber resources was, however, sharply circumscribed already at an early stage, as they were increasingly obliged to deliver their timber to the crowns saw mills and restrict the utilization of their communal mills exclusively for non-market purposes. As we will see, the issue of the right to commercial utilization of timber resources, and production and sale of plank, was to constitute a major controversy between the peasants and the burghers in the period of mercantilism, in which the new absolutist state from 1660 onwards issued burgher privileges and monopolies in favor of the growing cities and their new classes. This controversy came to a head in The Age of Democratic Revolution (to use R. R. Palmers expression), in Denmark-Norway most notably in the Lofthus-rising of the 1780s, and was manifested in the highly liberal an democratic demands put forward by the farmers in their constitutional drafts in the spring of 1814 in an age in which laissez faire was young and fresh and still imbued with high ethical standards.4

The reformation and its consequences In the early years of the 16th century, however, as a prelude to the political consequences of the Reformation
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a generation later, duke Christian (II) at that stage viceroy of Norway handed over all the countrys fiefdoms to Danish noblemen and stripped the national council of its powers, only to be compelled to reverse these dispositions by way of written concessions to the struggling Norwegian nobility in 1513 but the trend was set. In his reign as monarch, Christian II became a forerunner of another characteristic trait of early modern historical developments in North-Western Europe. Largely influenced by the Dutch business woman, Sigbrit Willums, the mother of his mistress, he paved the way for the peculiar subduing of the nobility in this region, most conspicuously in The Low Countries and DenmarkNorway. Ms. Willums was entrusted with the control of the treasury and the customs duties, favoring accumulation of capital, expansion of trade, and growth of cities in the vein of her home country, where this process had been going on for centuries albeit predominantly due to the pressure from the prosperous burghers themselves. Obviously, in the early 16th century these developments were also intertwined with the culminating era of the Hanseatic League, strongly influencing Norwegian conditions through its trade operations, most notably in the city of Bergen along the West coast, supplying international markets from the rich fisheries. Being a long standing question of survival for the Northerners, the importation of grain, conducted by
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the Hanseatic merchants largely in exchange for dried and salted cod was highly welcomed in the North, and the vicissitudes of the relations between the Danish crown and the Hanseatic League shifting sides between the Danish and the Swedish kingdoms in the Reformation era were of major importance to the common people of Norway. The important Hanseatic trade route in the Baltic Sea and into the Atlantic, passed most conveniently through the narrow strait of Oresund, implicating that the dynastic relations between the Danish and Swedish courts and the North German duchies and the relationship of the Hanseatic League towards each of them largely determined the customs rates in the Oresund, and thereby the market prices of staple wares such as fish and grain. For example, politics changed and economic premises took new turns whenever dynastic ties were formed as well as disrupted, and after Christian IIs successor, Frederick I, married an aristocratic Pommeranian woman, the pendulum swung in favor of the nobility for a while more or less retarding the rise of bourgeois hegemony until the establishment of absolutism and urban privileges in the mid 17th century. As for the peasants in this period, their economic situation would be highly different according to their specific location in the country, so that for example those along the Northern coast would be seriously concerned with the optimal functioning of the
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markets, while the subsistence producers in the inner parts of the country laid greater stress on the land rent system and the taxation of landed produce. In 1536, the turmoil of the Reformation reached the kingdom of Denmark-Norway, but not in the form of popular movements with a long standing legacy such as was the case on the European continent and in England. After a preliminary step was taken in 1527, when the Church was declared national and independent of Rome, the shift in ideology was accomplished in a stroke, and directed by the king himself. The very abruptness and intensity of the process itself made for an inverted revolution, as it were, in which the power of the state was increased to an unprecedented degree in this part of Europe. While the Reformation had launched such continental revolutionary movements as the German peasant revolts in the 1520s inaugurating the modern revolutionary tradition in the Nordic countries it seemed to overawe the commoners and bewilder them with the new gospel, however much occasional peasant revolts occurred throughout the ensuing centuries. There had been no popular movements against the Catholic Church in the north, and there were no legendary figures like Wat Tyler, John Wycliffe, Jan Hus or Etienne Marcel who could inflame peoples urge to take power into their own hands on a large scale. Those revolts, which occurred between 1400 and 1700, were largely
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spontaneous expressions of discontent, hardly founded on ideology apart from semi-mythological appeals to the above mentioned army of Huns. The early printing presses of the Reformation era, arriving belatedly in the North, certainly increased literacy in due course, but almost solely among the town populations, until the new impetus of the Enlightenment in the 18th century urged the rural population to pick up reading and writing. On the other hand, the oral literary tradition had a strong hold on the peasants, as exemplified in the prophecy about the coming of the liberating Huns and the rich folklore of legends portraying identified persons confrontations with state officials. For example, a recurring theme in these oral legends and fairytales is the identification of the tax gatherer with Satan. Still, the very considerable secularization process launched by the Reformation concomitantly with increasing the power of the state at the cost of clerical power laid the foundation for a however slow -development of rational social criticism, culminating in the Age of Enlightenment and democratic revolutions in the 18th and early 19th centuries. At the judicial level, the reformation led to a transition from canonic to Mosaic Law in Denmark-Norway, which
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 among other significant effects implied that all authority originated in god, and consequently that warfare, famine and pests were gods punishment for disobedience towards the authorities. The king, Christian III, who accomplished the Reformation in Denmark and Norway, even expressed that he would rather have a country (Norway) bereft of people than a disobedient people a logical, albeit cynical, conclusion from the fact that the main interest of the court and its treasury lay in the mineral mines of the North at first in its iron ores, and subsequently cooper and silver ores. In reality, the rule of the country did not become as brutal as these harsh words may suggest, although the new jurisprudence system led for example to an immense increase in the incomes from fines to the state treasury. Hence, the commoners were disciplined from above to a greater extent than before. Among their immediate consequences, the new directives implied that from that stage onwards it was not only the leaders of rebellions who had to answer for their deeds, but anyone who may had participated in seductive and rebellious activities against the authorities. These kinds of directives were a consequence of the increasing individualization resulting from the Reformation process, as implied in its main theme that it was the individuals faith alone which could make for his or her salvation an altogether new ideology which fitted like hand in glove to the needs of a
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state apparatus bent on strengthening its power, and extending its control into the remotest recesses of the kingdom, without having to resort to brute force more than now and then, just to statute examples. The most important channels for the farmers to influence upon their own conditions, were the local court the bygdeting an institution with ancient roots in Norwegian history, in addition to the new institution coined by the king, the so-called herredag, which were held on an irregular basis from the 1580s onwards, and at which the king was supposed to be present in person as a supreme judge (Judex Superior) a task, however, which most of the Danish monarchs rarely undertook. The judicial revolution in the 16th century implied that the local courts became an obligatory primary institution in the judicial system; thence came the so-called lagting, overlagting and the above mentioned herredag (as a supreme institution of appellation). The bygdeting had been immensely revitalized in the wake of the demographic and economic crisis caused by the Black Death (1349), after a previous weakening because of the centralizing tendencies within the state machinery and its expanded administrative apparatus throughout the 13th century. With the low population numbers, which lasted from the days of the Black Death and well into the 16th century, the bygdeting became the most common and obvious arena for solving disputes and conflicts. In these
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local courts the farmers themselves were represented as judges, to the extent that they were appointed as lagrettemenn (jury members) which implied that they were the best men of the village. In certain districts as many as one half of the population was entitled to a role as lagrettemann, a handful of people at a time. However, with growing pressure from central authorities it became increasingly unpopular and even risky to be seated as a lagrettemann in ones home village; hence, many cases were referred further on to lagtinget. Too lenient sentences exposed the local peasant judges to the vigilant eye of the state authorities, and, conversely, heavy fines and sentences incurred hatred among their own community members. Moreover, the new Mosaic Law also implied persecution of transgressions never heard of before such as the ones related to witchcraft adding to the increasingly complicated role and tasks of the local courts. The above mentioned herredag also became an important arena for solving conflicts, and for negotiations in general, between the authorities and the public. At these gatherings there were proclaimed complaints against fiefs and taxmen, who were accused of a too harsh treatment of the farmers, of ruthless witch hunts, etc. The subject matter could also imply issues stemming from the changes in the taxation system, which disfavored the peasantry and undermined the humane treatment of the
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poor. One of the major issues addressed by the peasants at these herredager, was the conditions of tenancy among the workers on the land; conditions which had had a tendency to deteriorate in the course of the 16th century, with the high rent sums and the so-called third years rent (tredjeaarstake). At the herredag in 1585, the fief, Erik Munk in Agder, was disposed of his post by the king after having overtaxed and harassed the farmers in various ways, in addition to organizing witch hunts. He was also sentenced for having stolen money which, according to the rules, was supposed to be delivered to the court.5 At the same herredag, the rent and the third years rent was confirmed by law; hence, the king gave a little to both sides of the social struggle. Another instance which makes one wonder to what extent the king actually nourished considerable paternalistic care for the lowliest subjects of his monarchy which the monarchs claimed as being implicit in the justification of their rule is the fact that when another fief, Ludvig Munk in Trondelag, was bereft of his former position by the king because of transgressions against the peasants, he was shortly afterwards bequeathed the highly prestigious Stattholder office in Norway an office which entailed the duty, for example, to see to it that the fiefs showed a proper conduct in their respective districts. This happened seven years after the conclusion of the Nordic Seven Years
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War (1563-70) a war in which the Norwegian peasant soldiers demonstrated their noble moral principle of disobeying the kings commanders whenever they tried to enforce an attack into Swedish territories. The war had been costly, and the peasants disobedience untimely, for the court two main facts which may explain the kings indulgence towards incompetent and greedy fiefs and taxmen. His failure to deal with the abuses, however, caused a wave of subsequent risings among the peasants, complaining of the fiefs and taxmens greed, avarice and brutality. The Stattholders role, apart from keeping an eye on the fiefs conduct and organize the military forces, was also to keep an eye on the fiefs and taxmens conduct all over the country, and it is highly illustrative of the increasing authoritarianism of the period that the king, Fredrik II, appointed the notorious peasant harasser, Ludvig Munk, to this important office in the state administration. Possibly, the king had come to the conclusion that the Norwegian population needed to be chastised and punished, after the from his point of view deplorable non-dedication from the latter during the Nordic Seven Years War. During this war, the farmers in the border areas against Sweden had concluded separate farmers peace treaties among themselves and the Swedish farmers, and a fief named Rosenkrantz in Bergenshus had to retort to severe threats in order to get the farmers to
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follow himself to Trondelag with the view to beat the Swedish out of there. True, the farmers were not directly punished for their lacking military spirit and discipline in the wake of the war. However, it must have struck the king that the farmers would have to be disciplined in order to be of much avail in war situations at a later stage. At least, this was the conclusion reached by the king Christian IV, when he largely experienced the same during the Kalmar War in 1611-13. There were peace treaties among the farmers on both sides of the border, in addition to mass desertions, and the farmers would absolutely not indulge in any kind of offensive war a long standing legacy dating back to the end of the Viking era. They referred to the land law of Magnus Lagabote from 1274 (which was to last in Norway all the way until the 17th century), in which it had been definitively concluded that the farmers in the defense of the country were obligated to go to the border and defend it, and no further. Apart from the stattholder post, which in the ensuing century (until 1720) was primarily occupied with the military service and warfare issues in addition to the above mentioned scrutinizing of the state officials the introduction of the position of sorenskriver represented a novelty which was to have great importance. This position was introduced in 1591, whereupon the sorenskriver became a co-judge with the lagrettemenn in
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1634, and then sole judge in 1687 (with the introduction of Christian Vs law code in Norway). This development led to a considerable disempowerment of the farmers, who from then on had to rely on the so-called supplications and the herredag, to make their case heard before the authorities and present their version of the social landscape. One of the tasks of the sorenskriver was to write such supplications on behalf of the farmers supplications which were sent to the king in Copenhagen or to his closest subordinates. Despite their loss of political influence, the farmers primarily in the coastal areas (which was the main area in which they lived before the population growth took off towards the end of the 16th century) experienced an economic take off with the new water powered saw mill, and the increasing demand for timber and wooden products throughout Europe. In the beginning, this business proceeded without any state control mechanisms (by some historians regarded as anarchy, in the pejorative sense of the term, but more properly belonging to the communalistic and self-reliance legacies), and with the new focus on industrious conduct which took root in the commoners soul in the wake of the reformation, thrifty farmers could earn good money as a result of this revitalized aspect of the traditional versatile way of life among the peasantry in the Northern countries most notably in Norway, but also to some extent in the vast
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forested coastal areas of Sweden and Finland. The trade in wooden materials soon became the most important manifestation of the new economic growth, and the total worth of the saw mill business in Norway, all in all, was estimated to approximately 5 million daler in 1660. By that time, however, the nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie, apart from the crown itself, had forced the farmers aside in the struggle for these resources. With the city privileges from 1662 onwards, in the immediate wake of the introduction of absolutism (1660) and the saw mill privileges in 1688 the trade in wooden products became the sole domain of the bourgeoisie, while the farmers had to rely on the produce from their versatile agriculture, the fisheries (especially in the north of the country), and various forms of handicraft. Some means of subsistence were also gathered among those who inhabited the areas which belonged to the so-called circumferens around the metallurgical industries, which were established in the 16th and 17th century for which they were obliged to deliver timber and contribute transport services, a duty which was seen by many as an odious burden. Throughout the pre-absolutist era there were numerous so-called peasants visitations to the king in Copenhagen, in cases where the commoners took their time to organize such protest campaigns rather than burst out in rebellion. These visitations occurred most
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frequently in the long time periods when the king was totally absent from Norway, in which periods his officials conducted their affairs in an increasingly arrogant and haughty way, putting excessive tax money demanded from the peasants in their own pockets, and so on; hence, it is no coincidence that the most intensive period when it comes to peasants visitations to the king, was in the latter half of the 16th century, in which the king(s) failed to visit the country for more than 40 years in a row. The peasants in the discontented areas sent off a delegation to present their grievances to his majesty the causes of which grievances encompassed all the issues involved in the actual risings and direct action. The peasants visitations, however, were proscribed in 1684, a date that anyhow had seen a reduction in complaints, mainly because of the new and more professional administration. For the peasants class struggle, the king was an instrument identified with justice itself and their illiteracy bereft them of the ability to comprehend the subtleties in the process of power centralization. Hence, while they lent strength and legitimacy to the crown, through their appeals to its disinterestedness, the reinforced state machinery involved itself in increasing and costly warfare, so that taxation pressure the very main source of peasant grief intensified immensely. However, as pointed out by Koht, the peasants war resistance indicates that they more or less intuitively saw
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the connection, and their refusal to carry arms under the kings command was rebellion against his person and the state. Hence, although interconnected with other issues, the war rebellions had wider and deeper implications than the recurrent revolts against the fiefs and the tax collectors. They ran counter to one of the two basic pillars of the state the monopoly of violence and its usage, and the power of jurisprudence. Before the state could emerge in a mature form anywhere, it had to usurp this monopoly and this power from self-governed and often confederated country regions and cities. And after the state had gained hegemony, the risk was always there that society could relapse into one of its previous political forms albeit on a new and different socio-economical basis, and only rarely occurring in history except when involving a very long time span between the past and present versions. The peasants in Norway, despite their faith in the king, remained anti-statist in their spirit and economical orientation, and did not coalesce into a movement organized on a national basis before their entire social structure came under threat in the latter half of the 19th century. But, however regional their premodern organization and rebellions were, they represented a threat serious enough to be reckoned with, not least in the form of the autonomist tendencies in certain border regions between Norway and Sweden. War resistance has underlying confederal implications, in
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the obvious sense that it undermines the authority of the state and creates fraternization across state lines. The peasants peace was a general Nordic phenomenon, most notably developed among Danish and Swedish peasants in Skaane/Blekinge and Smaaland respectively, from 1505 onwards. During the Kalmar War (1611-13), as already mentioned, there were mass desertions by peasant soldiers on both sides of the Norwegian/Swedish border. The unwilling soldiers even pointed their arms against their commanders when they were told to charge into the neighboring country, both because they had relatives and acquaintances there, and because they intensely regretted the spoliation of their farm work by war. To make it clear that they were proud of their stance, they marched home under banners and to the beat of their drums, corresponded by nationwide resistance against the war in Norway. Hence, the king had a defunct army in Norway at least when it came to offensive warfare, which any state leader is hard put to justify under any circumstances. In comparison, the tax revolts were directed against the kings officials, and actually expressed loyalty towards the king, as well as representing the commoners urge to see to it that his decrees were carried out properly.6

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State power and capital versus confederal ties and basic staple values There is a universal tendency throughout history in recurrent warfare and the corresponding militarization of society to bring about centralization of power in ancient as well as medieval and modern times. And with centralization of power comes increasing and eventually unsustainable urbanization: The peasants are drawn away from farming and into the army as soldiers; land is laid waste in different ways and more and more people seek to the cities for new occupations and safety. In the actual time period, however, the effects were not yet utterly dramatic as regarding the balance between town and country. But in Denmark-Norway, at least, the coming of absolutism, reinforced by the new ideology of the monarch as gods representative on Earth, answerable to god alone, signaled a new societal turn in favor of the urban burghers endowed with legal economic privileges as the legacy of the war ridden 17th century. After long periods in the 16th century, during which the king did not show up in Norway at all, the new mercantilist spirit and its emphasis on mines and metals caused Christian IV to attend far more closely to Norwegian affairs. Hence, he conducted several long journeys to the province in the North, in which he
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established a silver mine, attended several herredager, and acquainted himself with the conditions in general. He strongly wished his officials to be servants rather than lords, and his centralization policy favored the peasants at the economic level as against the tax gathering fiefs; politically, however, the former lost ground as they were, from 1628 onwards, excluded from estate meetings regarding taxation. Considering the frequent peasant risings in the 16th century, the king had every reason to fear an escalation of such ephemeral and regionally based unrest into more widespread insurgencies even to the extent of approximating the German Peasant Wars in the 1520s although the actual numbers of insurgents in Norway would have been far lower than the tens of thousands who rose in the far more densely populated German regions. His fears motivated a comprehensive administrative reform program, with special regard for the taxation system, the long term effect of which was to soften the peasants complaints despite tax increases in an unprecedented scale throughout the war ridden 17th century; a period in which the development of the militarist Prussian state south of the Scandinavian kingdoms set the standard for state development in general. The fact that the German peasants were largely fought by the nobility in the form of their Swabian League, whose brutality against the peasants (mass
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slaughterings during truces, and so on) dishonored the confederal principle, presented exactly the scenery of social disintegration which has always favored the growth of centralized states. However, the marked contrasts between the prosperous United Dutch Provinces, with their anti-militarist and confederal outlook on the one hand, and the deep entanglement of Prussia in the ruinous 30 Years War on the other, made for certain compromises in the north. Hence, the crucial question of civil administration had to be addressed sooner or later. Confederalism, which is an age old inter-regional organization principle which has been most common among pre-statist and even post-statist -- societies, still posed a veritable challenge throughout the early modern period. Thus, the fairly well known Gulatinget, which challenged the emergence of state power along the Norwegian west coast in the Middle Ages, was accompanied with similar political-economical structures in inland regions and other coastal areas. In the border regions between Sweden and Norway, at the latitude of Nidaros (Trondheim), the Jamtamottinget was destined to play an important role in the struggle against state encroachment from both sides as witnessed by the numerous interregional peasants peaces concluded in this area throughout the consolidating stages of the early modern Scandinavian states. The very site of the ting
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(confederal assembly), where decisive deliberations were undertaken by the farmers themselves or, rather, their mandated delegates in a manner similar to the Gulating organization, was strategically located along the major trade route between the Atlantic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia, and perpetuated the important interconnected regional markets, largely beyond the authorized commercial hegemony of the burghers (from the 1660s onwards). Hence, the rural people along this traditional trade route had the highest stake in keeping out of dynastic conflicts, which were most certain to disrupt their provision lines and the outlet for their surplus staple goods; they knew very well that their entire trading way of life would be threatened if peaceful contact somehow was inhibited in their topographically challenging regions. The fact that the court acknowledged that not everything was functioning adequately within the administration apparatus in Norway during the fief system inherited from the Middle Ages, is testified by the so-called Bjelke Commission of 1632. In that year every single one of the fiefs and their taxmen were investigated with respect to their financial documents as well as their conduct towards the common people and the commission was concluded with the dismissal of eight tax gatherers. Under the fief administration system, the state revenue was divided into two separate sources of income gathered
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by the fiefs and their taxmen. These incomes were called, respectively, the uncertain rent (uvisse leie) incomes which the fiefs were supposed to obtain through the ordinary accounts (customs, fines, and so on), and from which the fiefs were to keep only 1/5. The fixed rent (landskyld) and the traditional tax (leidangskatt) was called the certain rent (visse leie), of which the fiefs were supposed to keep . From the extra taxes which increased rapidly due to the immense increase in the military expenses of the state during the 17th century, the whole amount of money collected went to the crown. The ruin of the treasury in the wake of the 30 Years War (1618-48) led to heavy tax increases, and there were no room for additional pressure on the taxpaying peasants from self-serving state officials and tax gatherers. Thus, the whole administrative system was made more efficient, creating salaried crown officials, and due to the demand for tax money turning the traditional subsistence economy increasingly into a monetary economy and expanding market relations, encompassing even the poorest farmers. The growing importance of the market, however, posed no major threat to the peasants, and later the yeomen as long as it had a regional focus as regards the staple products. Only with the new mass production techniques and overseas trade in grain in the latter half of the 19th century did the market forces seriously threaten Norwegian (and other Nordic) farmers
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 the tragic results of which process was the ruin of the soils of the Midwest duly followed by the mega scale announcement of the fact by Gaia herself in the form of The Dust Bowl of the 1920s, and the mass emigration of Norwegian farmers throughout the period, while the remaining ones grew increasingly reactionary into the mid-war era. In their heyday, however, the Norwegian yeomen were strong adherents to laissez faire, as manifested in their constitutional drafts of 1814 at a time when the relationships between town and country still had a balanced character. As always in periods of privilege systems and prohibitions, the suddenly illegalized trade and craft activities among the rural populations continued largely as before in the form of black marketing which, moreover, grew even more elaborate and far-reaching with the increasing yeoman shipbuilding throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, rural people were notoriously black marketing whether by foot, horse, boat or ship exchanging their surplus staple wares with other native, illegalized traders as well as foreign merchants. The market places were generally localized in distant mountain areas (for example along Normannsslepene across the Hardangervidda, in the highlands between east and west) and similar traditional sites in distant and secluded corners along the cost. Apart from these important trade activities, the
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country folk also notoriously neglected the burgher privileges regarding craft work, as when they did carpenter work for sympathetic contacts in the cities, or when they were selling their farm produced wooden boats and most of the boat builders lived in rural areas, while boats were no less needed in the cities, which were mainly situated along the coast. These regionally integrated economic relationships, moreover, also had certain moral and political implications, cutting across the territorially founded hegemony of the king and the state. Hence, it was of singular importance for the court to attain the loyalty among its subjects amidst the immense increase as far as taxes is concerned especially since they were needed as soldiers in the recurrent wars fought against the Swedish monarchy. During the Kalmar War (1611-13), Swedish troops occupied Jemtland, without Norwegian resistance the Norwegian peasant soldiers being weary of fighting wars for a royal power which increasingly plundered their resources and exploited their labor. After declaring the peasants army useless for his own purposes in the wake of that war, Christian IV initiated a Norwegian standing army towards the final stages of his engagement in the Thirty Years War (the so-called Danish stage, 1625-29), but cancelled the initiative at the conclusion of the war. Only during the administration of stattholder, Hannibal Sehested, there was to be organized a
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permanent army consisting of Norwegian villagers, who took part in the so-called Torstensson Feud in 1643-45 (called the Hannibal Feud on the Norwegian side of the border) an army which fared better than any Norwegian army had done in centuries, when it comes to obedience and discipline. The war was conceived of as a defensive one, and it implied an overwhelming influx of additional tax money without much protest from the farmers who also played their part as soldiers in accordance with the kings will. Another aspect which contributed to the fact that the farmers consented to the increasing tax pressure, was their right to negotiate about the taxation levels at the above mentioned herredager. Moreover, as already mentioned, they did their best to increase their incomes through hard labor in various and versatile occupations. The fact that the unwilling farmer soldiers during the Kalmar war had been severely punished for their resistance against fighting (loss of their homesteads, etc.), presumably contributed to their readiness to participate as soldiers in the courts military engagements against Sweden which were to be numerous in the years between 1611 to 1720. In fact, there were full blown warfare between the two states in 1611-13, 1643-45, 1657-60, 1675-79, 1700 and 17091720. In the four latter wars, the peasants peace was nowhere any longer to be seen, probably largely because the immensely growing military power of Sweden
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throughout the 17th century was conceived as the aggressor, even among the peasant soldiers who, moreover, by this time also had been organized into a more professional army with less stake in farming, and become increasingly alienated from their brothers across the border. After the conclusion of the war in 1660 (the so-called Charles 10 Gustav War), there occurred a highly precarious situation for the Danish-Norwegian state. The regions Baahuslen, Halland, Blekinge and Skaane had been lost to Sweden, while Copenhagen had been under siege for quite some time, and only coped with the situation thanks to Dutch assistance; the latter facilitated through a trade treaty between the Dutch provinces and Denmark-Norway from 1649 until 1684. To make the situation even worse, the state debt had increased to 5 million riksdaler, and to put this sum in relief one may add that the state revenues in Norway did not run higher than less than 500 000 riksdaler in 1660. When Frederick III ascended the throne in 1648, the Danish riksraad (government) achieved a considerable increase in its power base through the formal coronation act. The warfare of Christian IV had been highly unpopular among the nobility and the situation did certainly not improve with the defeats endured by the Danish side against an increasingly strong Swedish
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military power which rose to the heights of the European power struggle at the time. During the war of 1657-60, the elite among the nobility had hesitatingly supported the war efforts, and the king himself had been in the forefront of the battle engagements, while the absence of the nobilitys government officials in the riksraad had weakened their position. Due to the mounting debt, the war spoliations, and the Swedish threat which lingered on the king, Frederick III took measures which came to result in the introduction of absolutism in the Danish-Norwegian state, more or less simultaneously with the restoration of the monarchy in England, in 1660. There was strife between the various estates in the Estates General which Frederick III had convened as regards the state finances. The clergy and the burghers demanded equal terms with the nobility, and were finally heeded to say the least. After a military state of emergency in Copenhagen, the king was bequeathed hereditary rights to the monarchy, and in addition he achieved the authority to facilitate constitutional changes a position he utilized to avoid any references to an Estates General in the future. Subsequently, his absolutist act was sent around the country for approval. Hence, absolutism was introduced in the three parts of the Danish kingdom the Danish mainland, the duchies
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of Schleswig and Holstein, and Norway. As for Norway this monumental change was to result in an immense turnaround of the administrative system more precisely in a rationalization of the local administration, and a more efficient form of government. In the central state administration, there occurred a transition to collegial rule and the introduction of a royal cabinet which were especially well utilized by the stronger monarchs, most notably Frederick IV. The customs system and postal services had been introduced in Norway in the 1640s a fact that illustrates the importance of, for example, the customs on the export of wooden materials which, in the 1660s, represented a formidable part of the state revenues. The mineral district of Kongsberg, in which silver had been mined since 1623, another novelty introduced during this period in Nordic history, the importance of which is illustrated by the establishment of a centralized mining administration for Norway in 1654; minerals as well as timber, fish and soldiers were supposed to be the main contributions from this part of the kingdom, all of which were increasingly removed from the control of the peasants by the burgher privileges granted by the absolutist monarchs. Even the age old craft traditions among the farmers were assailed, through the edict that all artisans shall live in cities. With an urban population of 30 000 people among 410 000 all in all (1662), the unreasonable character of the privileges
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shines forth and they came to be continuous sources of strife all the way until they were abolished in the 19th century, somewhat too late to save the rural cultural legacy. In 1680, there were absolutist tendencies even in Sweden under Charles XI, and royal judicial monopoly was secured in 1682. This fact certainly influenced Christian Vs new legal code, which appeared in Denmark the year after and in Norway in 1687, aiming at no less than the regulation of all aspects of social life. The law reform certainly reinvigorated the judicial system and strengthened the legal rights of ordinary citizens, including those accused of witchcraft. On the other hand, however, the law of 1687 definitively replaced Magnus Lagabotes law of 1274 which had to contain certain formulations pertaining to the ancient peasant legalism in order to be accepted by the commoners thereby putting an effective end to whatever vestiges that may have remained of this time honored legacy in the wake of the latter law. Among the specific regulations in the law of 1687, there were those relating to landed property and its cultivation, as well as a new and more enlightened approach to witchcraft. As regards the local administration, the old fiefs were substituted with so-called amts; hence, the old lords of the fiefs were substituted with amtmenn. Above these
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hovered stiftsamtmenn and stattholder, and as the closest subordinates of the amtmenn, there were taxmen and priests. The new offices were remunerated by the state; moreover, they were bereft of the influence which the former lensherrer (fiefs) had enjoyed as regards the taxation process, by the fact that the control of this process was bequeathed to their masters, the stiftsamtmenn (grand fiefs) who collected the tax money before these were sent down to the treasury, rentekammerkollegiet, in Copenhagen. Due to this novel organizational structure, the king and his ministers achieved a much better control over the state revenues, and the new situation facilitated a far more efficient way of drawing resources from Norway. The transition to absolutism also entailed an emerging turning away from the agrarian basis of society (to the extent that this is possible), and over to the emerging commercial capitalist system which preceded industrial capitalism before the Industrial Revolution from the mid 18th century onwards. Despite these new developments, agriculture came to provide the basic occupation for 80-90 per cent of the population of the dual monarchy all the way into the early 19th century. It was the burghers who were supposed to be the new backbone in the absolutist state in companionship with the state servants. Both of these groups were largely recruited from abroad many among them came from
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Germany and it took quite some time before a separate Norwegian social elite developed. The urban privileges, which were introduced in 1662 as well as the saw mill privileges granted to the burghers in 1688 clearly showed on what foundations the state authorities intended to base the economic future of the kingdom. The saw mill privileges system caused 536 mills to close, conferring monopoly on the remaining 664 as regards export trade in wood stuffs, and the very system itself was justified by alleged overproduction causing falling prices. No doubt, the problem could theoretically have been solved by redirecting production, for example, into finished wooden products, but then again this would have collided with the royal craft privileges which excluded the peasants from entering such occupations. The monopolies which were achieved by the upper classes in Copenhagen (the emerging bourgeoisie), as well as in the other growing cities, also represented an unambiguous expression of the mercantilist economic policy which was pursued until the second half of the 18th century. The bourgeois vein of the new economic policy is also illustrated by the new customs imposed on landed produce carried to the city markets by the farmers (1680). The overall consequences of this economic policy were increasing tensions between the various estates, also in the Norwegian part of the kingdom, especially between the farmers on the one hand and an elitist alliance
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between state officials and wealthy burghers on the other. However, the conflict was largely subdued by the long period of peace between 1720 and the early 19th century, only to erupt in major struggles at later stages in history, most notably in the couple of decades preceding the parliamentary revolution in 1884. The essential economic developments initiated by the early reforms of the absolutist state, represents the first substantial challenge in Denmark-Norway against the ancient notion and logically established fact that agriculture constitutes the basis of civilization; there must be production before there can be any sale, and only agriculture represents genuine production, while other economic activities involves at least as much consumption as production in the strict sense of the latter. In fact, the introduction of absolutism in DenmarkNorway amounts to a veritable bourgeois revolution in the affairs of government, immensely diminishing the influence of landed interests especially the nobility in stark contrast to the French absolutism in the same era. To the ruling Danish elites, agriculture in Norway seemed to be of little account, insignificant in bulk produce compared to the rich and extensive Danish agricultural soils, and conducted by an intransigent peasantry at that the nobility having been reduced to insignificance. The notions of quality produce and self reliance (often accompanying small scale soil
44

cultivation) in the Northern province counted for little seen from the mercantilist Ivory Tower in Copenhagen, and it became the task of the Norwegian farmers to argue their case for a decent livelihood and economic freedom throughout the century and a half preceding the national constitution adopted in Norway in 1814, during the preparation of which they demanded freedom of trade, as well as printing freedom and freedom of speech, in order to make a rounded and balanced living from their soils and forests. Perhaps the one single factor which benefited the peasants the most in the wake of the new absolutism apart from the improved administration system was the sale of the crown lands, which eventually fell into their hands, constituting them into a self-confident and hard working yeomanry who even undertook to prepare their own drafts during the Constitutional proceedings in the spring of 1814.7 The largely militaristic administration of the Norwegian province was appeased when, in 1699, it was split into a civil department headed by a vice-stattholder and a military department headed by a commanding general. This disentanglement allowed, at least in periods of peace, for more focus on productive economic matters and civic issues, which was the case throughout the 18th century, after the conclusion of the Great Nordic War (1720) a century which came to be the most thoroughly progressive one, seen from the yeomens stance. In the
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concluding decades of the 17th century, the peasants thus called as they hadnt yet achieved significant proprietary rights received noteworthy support from the singularly peasant friendly stattholder U. F. Gyldenloeve, who somehow cut across the grain of the new bourgeois ideology in the central state administration in Copenhagen. As quoted by Koht, Gyldenloeve regarded the farmers wealth as the main cause, the root and fundament of the kingdoms preservation in a vein reminiscent of the physiocrats half a century later. In the 1670s, the peasants presented a for the time period rare coordinated program, directed against the new bourgeois land owners who had bought the initial crown lands, put up for sale to pay the huge war debts. The peasants preferred to be tenants on crown lands instead of toiling for the profit hungry bourgeoisie. However, the crown was bankrupt and impelled to sell land, and to appease the peasants royal edicts fixed upper limits to the land rents and made the land less attractive for the bourgeoisie who sold their agricultural lands at the reduced prices to the peasants, and turned to other and more profitable businesses. Later on, in the subsequent stages of the sale of crown lands (in the aftermath of the Great Nordic War, 1709-20), the peasants were in a position to buy these lands directly, still at favorable prices. Hence, between 1658 and 1760, the percentage of peasant proprietors increased with up to 7-800 %. With
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the new property rights, the peasants became yeomen with all the self-confidence and self-esteem that follows from such a position; a position which was reinforced by the quadrupled number of cottagers throughout the same time period, mainly due to the yeomens need for lumber and harvest labor. In the mid 18th century, population growth caused further increases in the number of cottagers, whose condition was a very complex and dynamic one. Despite being exploited to a certain extent by the yeomen, and generally denigrated in society having only the servants below them in the social hierarchy the cottagers often engaged in various crafts and industries (largely off the record), and remained a highly mobile labor force which easily entered into the new trades of the Industrial revolution in the 19th century.

The new agenda of the Enlightenment As was the case in former periods in history and with roots all the way back to the Middle Ages the Norwegian peasants were highly loyal towards the crown especially towards the king himself. The complaints which reached the court from the common people in this period did not attack the apex of power, but rather the kings subjects within the administration apparatus and their alliance with the burghers. It was especially the
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taxmen and the administrators in the fiefdoms (and later, to a lesser degree, in the amts) who were under continuous attack from the discontented farmers and their complaints also singled out the privilege system for attack, as it favored the burghers and took away important ways of business and trade from them ways which they had utilized uninhibited at earlier stages in history. The long term historical background, however, of the Norwegian peasants loyalty towards the king, is the outdrawn civil war period in the 12th and early 13th century, in which a strong, centralized monarchy came to be viewed as the salvation against internecine strife. Significantly, the civil strife raged mainly in the Eastern part of the country in regions in which the confederal tradition had always been weak and even into modern times, the people of the West coast have tended towards a more republican orientation than the Easterners, as manifested in their high turnout in favor of a republic as against monarchy in the popular referendum of 1905, after the dissolution of the Union with Sweden. The long, and more or less continuous, war period throughout the 17th century came to an end with the peace treaty after the Great Nordic War (1709-20). Thus, one may notice that the last outright rebellion that we hear of until the Strile War in the 1760s, is a tax revolt
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in Sogn at the early stages of the former war. The fiercely independent Sogn farmers refused to pay the war related extra taxes, and, headed by their leader, Nils Kvithovud, even retorted to chase away a kings army. The rebel leader was subsequently arrested and chained; then, after appellations from his wife and fellow farmers, he was acquitted by the Oberhof court, before the Supreme Court finally settled the matter and sentenced Kvithovud and his wife to imprisonment for a year. The rebellion was quelled. During the same war, huge war damages were caused in the Eastern part of the country in 1716, after Swedish raids. In that case, the court had no other option than to grant tax relief to the peasants and the yeomen in the affected counties, that is, Ostfold and Hedemark, in order that they should be enabled to rebuild their farmsteads and restore their fields. The end of the Great Nordic War initiated a long period of increasing prosperity for the Norwegian yeomen. In the 18th century, Danish monarchs never again reached the same level of utilitarian interest in Norwegian matters as had been the case for Christian IV (in the early 17th century), although topographical researches and publications were conducted in the general spirit of the Enlightenment. The manifest negligence of Norwegian conditions by the court throughout the century, left room for a considerable revitalization of self-management, especially among the rural communities, in which the increasing numbers of
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yeomen partly combined with the more and more nationally oriented state officials against the bourgeoisie and partly engaged in bitter conflicts with both of them, especially towards the end of the century. The more literate the yeomen became in this enlightening era, the more forceful were their economic demands and political campaigning. Apart from the bourgeois privileges and monopolies, introduced in the early stages of absolutism, a major source of strife was caused by the introduction of the Danish grain monopoly in 1735 which restricted the sale of grain to Norway to Danish traders. While functioning tolerably well in normal times, this monopoly caused severe shortages and even famine in Norway in years of crop failure and war on the seas, and it certainly harmonized poorly with the new ideas of laissez faire presented by the Enlightenment philosophes from the mid-century onwards. Thus, in 1741 Danish crop failures led to famine in Norway, with high mortality rates, and such crises recurred from time to time as long as the monopoly lasted (1788). In the meantime, however, there had been several innovations within agriculture which strengthened the commoners as against the threat of hunger and famine. One of those innovations was the simple introduction of the potato, the stable growth of which secured harvests when other crops failed. Moreover, the C-vitamins in the potato entailed improving the overall health of the population,
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strengthening their immunity towards diseases. By the end of the 1760s, it was grown all around the country, and the much ridiculed potato priests did in fact contribute one of the clergys most useful tasks ever, when they preached agricultural methods from the pulpit. The rationalistic turn of events was greatly facilitated when the Danish court changed its international orientation from England to France in 1742, thereby entering into more intimate contact with the centre of the Enlightenment and with such radiating spirits like Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, et. al. immediately leading to the establishment of a Royal Scientific Institute in the same year. When the Church orthodoxy was replaced by state pietism in the period between Frederick IV and the end of the reign of Christian VI (1746), that is, during the early decades of the Enlightenment century, there were introduced several reforms which initially aimed at disciplining the people and educate it in godliness. The religious confirmation of the young was introduced in 1736, in the same year which saw the introduction of judicial exam for judges. One immediate effect of this heightened qualification demands, seems to be the yeomens victory in their outdrawn law suit against a tax gatherer, Hundt, between 1740 and 1751 culminating in the dismissal of the tax gatherer for transgressions against the farmers. The endurance of the latter in that
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instance points towards the largely well organized campaigns that they conducted in the forthcoming century and a half. Strengthening their capabilities in this respect, the public school system launched in 1739 gradually lifted the commoners out of illiteracy, even if the schooling for quite some time was restricted to reading Luthers writings and little else but no one could control completely what they read at home. When the censorship was somewhat lifted in the 1750s, after its long reign since the proclamation of Christian Vs law in 1687 corresponding to the wish from the authorities to stimulate public debate concerning economic issues even the public started to address important questions in the new public sphere, which opened up in the early stages of the Age of Enlightenment. Despite the disciplining and religiously motivated introduction of state pietism, one may speculate whether the yeomen in fact turned the new ideology into their own favor; the combination of piety, inner devotion and personal conversion, and an economically independent position, may easily make for a strong and rounded character, reinforcing frugality, individuality, pride and candidness traits that have characterized revolutionary yeomen throughout the ages. The decentralized economic structures constituted the arena on which these traits could be played out in the form of civic virtue, manifested in the elaborate systems of mutual aid
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(dugnad) around the country. This form of economical association necessarily had political implications, and influenced on the yeomens direct actions against the state officials and their supplications to the king. Moreover, the Royal Scientific Company, founded in Norway in 1760 by historian Gerhard Schning, et. al., was a major step towards raising the consciousness around the country regarding a broad specter of past and present conditions. Schning had a keen eye towards the Norwegian farmers and their versatile and ingenious adaptations to the specific climatic, biological and topographical conditions of the North. Among their many additional occupations, in addition to soil cultivation, Schning pointed to the in the modern age largely neglected importance of inland fisheries, supplying invaluable proteins in many parts of the country.8 The topographic publications which emerged from the 1740s onwards, did also contribute much to the stimulation of debate among the public, and also to a renewed interest in Norwegian economic issues and the history of the country. Throughout the 18th century, after the outdrawn period of warfare had ebbed with the conclusion of the Nordic Seven Years War in 1720, the focus was, as indicated above, increasingly aimed towards economic issues rather than political ones. The stagnation period regarding the economy and population growth from ca. mid 17th century and approximately a
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century ahead, was finally followed by new growth in which period especially the shipping business experienced an immense boom from the first ripples in the 1690s onwards. During the American War of Independence in the 1760s and 70s, the tonnage for Norwegian shipping was trebled moreover, its trade related activities resulted in several important sidebusinesses, such as for example tar production for export to the European continent. These changes in combination with the increasingly vehement resistance against the mercantilist privilege and monopoly system contributed together to certain initial liberal reforms within the economic sphere. These developments were apparently influenced by the introduction of printing freedom and free trade in Sweden in 1766, which concisely expressed the new ideals of the Enlightenment, and the parallel publications of the French encyclopaedia, which saw its first volumes in 1751. In Denmark-Norway, the censorship was lifted once more for a limited time period, during Struensees regency (1770-72). Printing freedom was granted in 1771, resulting in a veritable flow of pamphlets complaining of about the Danish grain monopoly, as well as advocating the establishment of a Norwegian university and banking system. At the apex of power, for all its ideological implications, Henrik Stampe succeeded Otto Thott as the main ideologue within the financial
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department agencies (rentekammeret and kommersekollegiet), conducting the treasury away from mercantilism, and in the direction of laissez faire.9

Popular organization and direct action in the Age of Democratic Revolution The first real attack against the royal power in the 18th century occurred in the 1760s, in the wake of the European Seven Years War, when an extra tax was introduced to finance the national deficit resulting from the cost of the neutrality operations during the fateful war. This occurred at a stage when taxation had been lessened for quite a while, and stattholder Gyldenloeve had even spoken in favor of this mild taxation policy, as a device to maintain the loyalty among the farmers towards the Crown understanding the threads in the Norwegians history back to the links between peasant legalism, fixed and fair taxation, and support for the Court. When an extra-tax was issued once again after being superfluous because of a long period of peace between 1720 and the mid 1750s farmers in the western parts of Norway organized themselves in a rising in 1765, which came to be called the Strile War (Strilekrigen). The furious farmers demanded the

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repayment of the tax money, and military troops were called upon to quell the rebellion. In the western region of the Strile-farmers, life had become relatively harsh during the previous decades, compared to the overall population as they were settled on tiny plots of agricultural soil which could not give them full subsistence so they had to turn to fishing (lumber resources being scarce), as people along the cost have always done. The change in their condition, however, was caused by three major economic tendencies; the grain that they had to purchase on the market had become increasingly expensive during the war years; the land rent among the tenant peasants were forced up; and their exchange product the fish tended to be priced lower at the regional market by the bourgeoisie of Bergen. The burghers monopolies and privileges largely ruled the local and regional markets, and were even largely controlling international trade to the extent that the latter complex phenomenon lends itself to substantial control at all. The poverty and accumulated anger of the Strile-farmers was accentuated by recurring poor fishing seasons, so that the extra tax resulting from a war which had ruined their socio-economic status became intolerable. It has been suggested by some historians that the causes of the Strile War parallels those of the English peasant rising of
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1381. However, only a proponent of historic materialism can avoid recognizing the tremendous dissimilarities of those two risings: While the latter was strongly motivated by the pre-reformation movement built around John Wyclifs teaching, and fuelled by rural and religious fighting hymns like Piers Plowman, the former was infused by the new ideals of the Enlightenment and the physiocrats stress on what may properly be called fair laissez faire. Hence, while the English peasants of the High Middle Ages fought a catholically oriented monarchical power and its economical basis in the nobility, the Strile fishing farmers fought the bourgeoisie and its royally privileged position. The common denominator between those two movements, then, appears to be that they were both farmers movements on the side of progress, when seen in the light of subsequent events and universal ideals. However, while the English rising in 1381 was a largely isolated event, especially when considering the communications in that age, the Strile farmers rising in 1764-67 occurred in an age when sailing ships continually crossed the Atlantic; impoverished American colonists were crying No taxation without representation!; and farmers were growing restless all over Europe because of war driven socio-economic changes (such as unprecedented urbanization) and the emerging Industrial Revolution.

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Hence, in Denmark, there were violent regional risings among the cottagers at Fyn, Falster and Bornholm in coastal areas with much the same economic basis as the Strile farmers against the extra tax introduced in 1763. Whether directly inspired by their rising or no, Norwegian farmers from Ryfylke and Gudbrandsdalen sent supplications to the king in the spring of 1764, which resulted in some modifications of the tax. The concessions, however, were far from enough, and organized tax refusals were conducted to the extent of armed demonstrations by yeomen against tax collectors accompanied by republican sentiments among the people. In the revolting areas, the degree of self-sufficiency in every basic product was relatively low; most notably, they were obliged to buy corn and deal with the burghers for whom the laws were made. The corn trade was regulated by the Danish corn monopoly, directly playing into the pockets of the merchant aristocracy, representing the bourgeoisie in its early stages. The growing class differences and increasing antagonisms entailed appalling scenes; when the peasants no longer were able to pay the tax, the tax gatherer sent the local sheriff to take mortgage in the form of cow, boat, bed, pots, and so on which could have no other result than starving them to death. Then, in March 1765, after meager winter months, infuriated and resisting the peasants forcibly deprived of their very means of life,
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in some cases by military troops who even charged the peasants for the service put on their summer boots and marched to the office of the county administrator (stiftsamtmann) in Bergen and besieged his office building. Immediately afterwards they were violently attacked by a garrison of soldiers and had to withdraw; but their militant action had frightened the authorities and the mortgaging came to a halt though not without renewed threats by the tax gatherer, Bildsoe. Very soon afterwards, the ripples of the initial direct action had spread around the region, the peasants considering the outcome of the event a half victory and were eager to achieve the second half. Once again, apparently spontaneously organized as so often among farmers the recently formed peasant militia gathered in Bergen and yelled slogans against the state officials, calling them a kings thieves. Finally, they entered the office of the county administrator, whom they delivered a beating when he refused to lift the extra tax. Softened by the peasants determination and anger, the county official then sought to pay his way out by a promise to pay back all the money, which had been collected in the form of the extra tax. Highly suspicious of his intentions, the peasants demanded from him a written order to the tax gatherer, and took him under arrest until repayment had been accomplished; after arriving some time afterwards, the tax gatherer received the same treatment. By these
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resolute actions the state officials started paying back the tax money the very next day, and also had to present a schedule for the repayment of the rest of it. Intensely provoked, and probably even nearly shocked to death, the aging Frederick V and his stattholder who had both been accustomed to loyal subjects in the North called in a patrol ship, troops and cannon in a panic in order to strike down the surprisingly militant rising as seen from their point of view being too ill informed about the condition among the peasants in the actual areas. A situation approximating civil war ensued from the dynamics of the situation when the peasant soldiers refused orders to attack their fellows in the peasant militia, and if they had taken the step even of turning their weapons against their own commanders, the whole scene would have had revolutionary dimensions. While only the states burgher soldiers were reliable to go against the insurgents, additional peasant risings spread all along the west coast, from Stavanger to Nordfjord, after the celebrating Strile farmers spread the news of their victory by way of the intensive boat traffic up and down the seaside districts. In Stavanger they threatened to tear down the kings palace, while peasant soldiers once again refused orders to move against a peasant gathering at Finnoy, in Rogaland. Everywhere the same demands against the extra tax were raised. At Finnoy the peasant militia was lead by an island farmer, Hans
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Viggnes, who was chosen by his 1500 collaborators to convey their grievances to the state official, whom he forced to appeal to the king for tax relief. In the mean time, in the district of the Strile farmers, the farmers militia disbanded after what they considered as a victory which it somehow was, if only in the very limited time perspective, but certainly with long term repercussions. The somewhat premature celebrations, however, provided the authorities with the time they needed to get their act together. The militant but nave Strile peasants were lead by a 22 years old burgher son, Joachim de Lange, who had bought a farm and was hurriedly accepted and acknowledged by the peasants in the area. The research commission after the rising described him as of poor manners combined with yeoman courage, and he had been ridiculed and harassed by the burghers for joining the peasants cause facts that illustrate the extent to which the peasants, and even the yeomen, were objects of contempt from the upper classes. Another leader was the professional soldier, Ola Hevikja, who surely had a certain influence on the kings disobedient elements in the army, and at the height of the revolt, the peasant militia numbered a few thousands who were prepared to take militant action against the very state itself though not directly threatening the very seat of power in Copenhagen itself.
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Probably encouraged by the stubborn attitude of the British king George III against the pre-revolutionary rebellions in his North American colonies, the Danish government moved in full force against the Norwegian insurgents and started its persecutions against the still celebrating peasants. By army raids the returned tax money were once again forced from the hands of the poor and insulted farmers, and their leaders were arrested. A royal edict in 1765 had declared against mass gatherings and associations, which henceforth were to be punished harshly; an edict, moreover, which were in operation well into the 19th century, despite the relatively liberal constitution of 1814, which came to turn down the most radical and libertarian yeoman demands. The legal procedures against the Strile rebel leaders launched in the year of the edict, which scarcely could have been known to the organizing peasants, were not completed until 1768. In initial sentences declared by the municipal court of Bergen, Lange was bereft of property and honor and convicted to labor in chains for the rest of his life while three others were sentenced to loss of property and death. In 1768, the Supreme Court in Copenhagen changed the sentences to death for all, moderated by the king to a life time in chains by which time Lange was already dead in prison. It was hardly any relief for his comrades and followers that the extra tax eventually was lifted after

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persistent refusal by peasants elsewhere to pay as they were obliged to endure it for another four years. A special historical significance of the Strile war is the fact that they raised their voice directly against the crown, which easily explains the kings personal modification of the sentences. The peasants had shown a strong solidarity among themselves, and confederal tendencies were spreading along the coast, among down trodden peasants who aimed at a proud yeoman position. The divide between a regionally oriented rural population, most notably in the coastal areas, and royally and increasingly nationally oriented state officials, appeared more clearly than in centuries past. To illustrate the strength of the leading yeomen, and the threat of the thousands who aspired to their status, certain state officials even tried to imitate their culture in the same vein as the nobility did in continental Europe during the German Peasants War (1524-25). Infused with a new insight into the mechanisms of government and economics, peasants and yeomen were increasingly united against what appeared to them as nonsensical and unjust laws, forced through without their slightest influence and largely necessitated by wars in which they had no stake whatsoever if they didnt happen to be on the side of Enlightenment France during the European Seven Years War. Moreover, they were increasingly well informed about their own history, which presented
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long lasting socio-political structures, which included yeoman legalism (farmer legislators) as well as freer trade opportunities for rural folk. With the extra tax lifted in 1772, a seemingly calm period followed in which more and more peasants managed to buy land and become yeomen, strengthen their economic basis, and dig deeper into whatever Enlightenment literature which may have found its way into their bookshelves. Especially in the coastal areas there were informal exchanges with foreign seamen bringing with them progressive ideas, challenging absolutist rule and mercantile monopolies. Already in 1737 and 1750, there had been popular campaigns and supplications addressing the tendency of the burgher privileges to cause crippling indebtedness among peasants, and even loss of farmsteads among yeomen. As these campaigns were dismissed by the Crown and its ministries, a sign of future militancy was shown by peasants and yeomen in a corn rebellion in 1752, rising against the Danish corn monopoly and the burghers trade privileges. The rebellion counted about 1000 militia men led by a man called Kristian Bie, and was quickly quelled whereupon Bie and his co-leaders received harsh sentences. In the aftermath of this insurgency there were introduced certain modifications of the burgher privileges, but not nearly enough to solve indebtedness among rural people.
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This struggle between farmers and burghers, with the Crown acting like a kind of arbiter between them, marked the whole of the Enlightenment era and continued well into the 19th century, and even within the highest circles there were disputes regarding the feasibility of the burgher privileges. In a vein resembling one of his forerunners, Gyldenlove, in the 1670s, stattholder Wibe, in 1722, called the mercantilist legislation a perversion of the market, causing injustices which harmonized poorly with the emerging Enlightenment ideals. However, to the government in Copenhagen, Norway was scarcely more than a colony, and its population at best labor tools for the treasury; hence, the age old statutes along the Norwegian coast entitling peasants to sale of timber to foreign ships, and direct import of grain naturally following from their topography were wantonly eradicated, for example in the Southern coastal region with the combination of Arendals new township status in 1723 acquiring the burgher privileges and the Danish corn monopoly introduced in 1735. With these few strokes of absolutist legislation, an entire cultural tradition and the very life and well being of at least 90 per cent of the population came under siege and disobedience, direct action and clashes were inevitable. To illustrate the glaring injustices and appalling counter-productivity of the mercantilist privilege system, burghers were claiming
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100 per cent advance on grain sold to rural folk in the mid 1700s grain which they had provided for themselves less than a generation earlier, through their own trading channels. The results were everywhere indebtedness among peasants and yeomen alike, with their consequent loss of agricultural land and forests to the burghers. The situation got increasingly tense, accentuated by the reactionary period of the Guldberg ministry in Copenhagen, which had withdrawn the liberal initiatives taken by Struensee in 1770-72. Consequently, by the early 1780s the rural populations in the counties of Nedenes and Bratsberg (Aust-Agder and Telemark) converged in a common socio-economic struggle against injustice, dearth and hunger as they were receiving poor quality food from the burgher merchants in return for high quality timber. Then, in 1786-87, simultaneously with a kindred rising in Massachusetts just before the outbreak of the Great French Revolution the well known Lofthus rising shook the southern regions of Norway. This was a near revolutionary rising primarily directed against the privilege system, which favored the increasingly powerful bourgeoisie, while denying country folk their age honored practices of doing craft work, shipping and trade. The leader of the rising, Christian Lofthus, was a reasonably learned man, and may well have drawn inspiration from studies in early Norwegian history, for
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example from the writings of above mentioned Schning, as well as from the Enlightenment literature in his era. In fact, as a seaman himself he travelled far and wide in North Western Europe. The rebellion stated an example of what came to be a farmers demand for economic and intellectual freedom, continued in their participation with respect to the constitutional efforts in 1814 including several drafts for a Norwegian constitution written by the farmers themselves, drafts which in many respects were far more radical than the constitution finally adopted by the wealthy burghers who confronted the yeomen at Eidsvoll during the spring of that year. Christian Jensen Lofthus, who gave name to the rising of 1786-87, was a sturdy yeoman, even honored by the authorities a few years before the rising for his excellent husbandry, which he combined with several side occupations in the quite casual vein among the Norwegian yeomanry to the extent of showing civil disobedience against the privilege system and his character has been treated by authors like Henrik Ibsen and Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. For example, he operated a saw mill belonging to his farm, and was engaged in ship building, shipping and trade, of which reasons he had been accused and persecuted by the authorities. He was obviously a prominent person among the rural communities in the region, albeit not of a particularly rare kind in Norway in those days, and it is a testimony to
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his self confidence that he acted as his own lawyer in the law suits raised against him for breaking the burgher privileges and monopolies. As a personification of his privileged opponents and profiteers of the bourgeois state, the local magistrate, Hans Smith, in Ostre Robyggjelag was also an iron works owner, exploiting farmers as well as workers, and renowned for his stinginess. Despite his oratorical gifts, Lofthus stood no chance in such an utterly corrupt judicial system, and when he was fined for the second time for his transgressions in 1783, he was forced to sell his farm which he had inherited from his grandfather in 1773 but was able to stay as his stepfather bought it back. During 1784-85, peasant and yeomen deputies from several communes in Telemark gathered and drew up supplications to the government, which responded by definitively prohibiting such actions an edict, however, immediately ignored by the commoners, who sent their delegate, Hans Kaalstad from Holla to Copenhagen to present for the Court a supplication signed by 33 persons. As no satisfactorily response was shown by the authorities, the impatience throughout the rural districts of the two counties grew, and in the spring of 1786 Lofthus in turn left for Copenhagen and complained to the prince regent about the tax gatherers of Nedenes amt (county) and the burghers for their cheating ways; moreover, he presented his complaints as on behalf of
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the fatherland. The prince, accepting Lofthus motivation, then required signatures from peasants and yeomen before he could deal with the issues, whereupon Lofthus sailed back to Nedenes with the impression of having been bequeathed a mandate from the prince, and then proceeded to agitate and organize his fellows throughout the country districts many of whom were hugely indebted or had even lost their farmsteads and readily responded to Lofthus campaigning. Lofthus, however, identifying the crown with justice and law, seen from a traditional agrarian perspective, obviously was not aware of the patent bourgeois designs of the mercantilist Danish government and largely mistook the selfcentered policies of the crown and its state officials. Throughout the spring of 1786, Lofthus travelled far and wide through the densely forested landscapes of Nedenes and Western Telemark, collecting country folks signatures for refreshed supplications to the Court in Copenhagen demanding fairer recourse to the utilization of their timber resources, and better exchange value against grain. It is illustrative of the campaigns focus that the largely self-sufficient among the farmers did not sign, as they had little or nothing to do with the cities. The ambiguous attitude of the authorities is illustrated by the fact that a co-leader of Lofthus, Peder Jaammaas, was forced to give up signature collecting in his district, while Lofthus who had a strong sense that
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he had a mandate from the prince still was unstoppable, urged on by a strong sense of justice and political conviction. He was essentially a libertarian communalist, and dedicated adherent to Enlightenment virtue much like a Jacques Necker in pre-revolutionary France, who tried to solve the French peasants problems through encompassing reform programs from the 1770s onwards for which he was beloved by the peasants, and fired by Louis XVI, during the revolutionary events leading up to the Great Revolution. In this neckerian spirit, Lofthus traversed the countryside and by early August he had gathered 500 signatures for a supplication demanding a research commission to scrutinize the conduct of the state officials and the burghers the whole campaign attaining a widely inter-regional approach. Then, despite the seemingly royally approved campaign and barely anyone else than the prince regent, Frederic (VI), and Lofthus himself, knew exactly what had been said in their previous exchange the situation in Southern Norway escalated with a sudden arrest attempt on the yeoman leader, who escaped and then immediately was surrounded by a permanent guard of commoners. A typically revolutionary situation occurred when the army which was sent after Lofthus quickly fraternized with him and his collaborators. Strongly encouraged by this support the campaign expanded into the back country, and resulted in mass mobilization throughout the two
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counties involved in the rebellion. By early autumn, 1786, a militia of 2-300 peasants and yeomen marched against the city of Lillesand, demanding confiscated papers back. Another confrontation occurred with the regular forces, commanded by general Dietrichsson, who had also led the campaign against the Strile farmers 20 years earlier; however, once again the peasant conscripts fraternized with the militia, who demanded free passage for Lofthus to Copenhagen a passage which the county official was forced to grant and by late autumn he embarked on another excursion to the prince, along with 30 deputies from the counties of Nedenes (Eastern Agder) and Bratsberg (Telemark). At this point the county official took the expected reactionary measures, and required an arrest warrant on Lofthus and assistance from mercenary troops, while the royal council responded immediately and appointed a research commission to investigate the rebellion. Somehow aware of the turn of events, Lofthus then halted in Helsingborg, Sweden, while several other members of the delegation proceeded to Copenhagen, where they were arrested at once. Feeling no need to share their fate he hurried back home to gather force, organize the militia, and consider new tactics for the rising. He found his collaborators in good spirit, and there were held lengthy deliberations among them in their revolutionary, guerilla like assemblies, supported
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and occasionally attended by large segments among the population, while Dietrichssons army consisting of soldiers drawn from far away chased the militia with the highly prioritized aim to capture Lofthus. The rebellion, however, became increasingly known and popular after the arrests of the supplicant farmers, and extended far into the mountainous hinterland. By early December, the peasant army or, more properly, militia had swollen to somewhere between a thousand and two thousand men poorly armed, but vibrating with physical strength and fighting spirit. In Arendal, burghers were panicking at the news of the militancy of their nearly besieging rural neighbors who, however, showed a remarkably decent and pacific conduct throughout the events. Though partly armed and capable of inflicting massive violence against their oppressors and exploiters, they mostly sufficed themselves with uncompromising demands and occasional threats one of which results was that the arrest warrant against Lofthus was withdrawn, so that he was once again granted free passage to Copenhagen to present the grievances. As a consequence of the increasing popular pressure against the authorities, a further commission was established to investigate the grievances and their causes. The commission happened to be led by Envold Falsen, who was a physiocrat and thus friendly inclined towards the rural agrarian producers, who according to the father of
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physiocracy, Francois Quesnay, conducted the only authentic production in society the other estates and classes considered as predominantly consumers of basic goods and resources.11 Despite being on the side of progress according to the most enlightened European spirits at the time, the revolting peasants and yeomen were hunted down as sure as the sun by the determined powers of a reactionary state apparatus, eager to wipe out the stir caused by Struensees liberal reform efforts a little more than a decade past; in the early winter of 1787, while the militia men were trying to keep warm in their not always perfectly insulated lumber houses, 350 of them were interrogated by the kings mercenary troops. It is a testimony to the stoic character of these men that there were neither any acts of aggression against the authorities during the arrests, nor was there any informing against Lofthus. By February, the commission had confirmed most of the rebels cases against the local authorities, and fired two state officials; however, abhorred by the militancy of the rebellion, the central authority decided upon getting rid of Lofthus who simply had become too much for them although it was not provided any other accusations against him than transgressions of the edict of 1765 against visitations by the commoners to the Court in Copenhagen.
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Considering brute military force against the revolting farmers as a whole highly counter-productive and even dangerous, the persecutors preferred list to chase down their most prominent leader, who at that point was surrounded by his guards determined to keep up the struggle. In a rare unguarded moment, however, Lofthus was lured in an ambush in Lillesand in March, 1787, when three men got hold of him and tied him up. Soon thereafter, he was transported by sea out of the area, and within a few days he was chained to a rock at Akershus fort, near Christiania (Oslo). His arrest and further treatment caused huge stirrings throughout vast regions of Southern Norway, such as in Telemark, where campaigning was perpetuated under the leadership of Oistein G. Ingusland. In Nedenes, tax gatherer Dahl was arrested by the increasingly infuriated farmers with the aim to exchange him with Lofthus and a civil war like situation occurred, in which the militia of 7-800 men was confronted by general Dietrichssons 300 troops, with their two cannons. If the number of men involved on both sides seems insignificant to the modern eye, one does well to remember that in this agrarian age the actual Nordic regions were sparsely populated the total population in Norway as a whole counting approximately 800 thousand at the eve of the Great French Revolution. Thus, never being able to trust his peasant conscript soldiers, the general wisely limited his operations to 82
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mercenaries and the two cannons, which proved to be enough against the poorly armed and largely pacific militia men who, moreover, undoubtedly suffered from the lack of Lofthus leadership as witnessed by their persistent attempts to have him released. Through a kind of exhaustion tactics, the state authorities managed to restore their preferred form of order. The sentence against Lofthus was not announced until five years later, in 1792, convicting him to labor in chains for life, while 13 other rebels were sent to the chains for one to three years. The sentence against the indispensable leader in that region and context was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1799, two years after his death, while the sentences against the others were greatly reduced, showing the ruling powers anxiety of not provoking renewed insurgencies as the news of the events spread around more remote country districts. At this point, moreover, the daughter of the above mentioned reformer, Necker, was married to Frances ambassador in Sweden, and as there had already been signs of fraternizing between the lofthusians and Swedish sympathizers, the Danish government had to balance on a very thin line not to incur far more sinister threats to their control over the Norwegian province. The Lofthus rebellion stirred the farmers over vast tracts of Southern Norway, and induced them to proceed with
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campaigns for liberal and democratic reforms throughout the rest of the century and all the way down to the decisive events of 1814 when Norway separated from Denmark as a result of a combination of the outcomes of the Napoleonic War and a widely popular Norwegian determination towards home rule. In the aftermath of the Lofthus rising, the sentiments of which had spread as far north as Buskerud and Hedemark, certain important reforms were introduced during the next few decades, although far from enough to satisfy farmers who increasingly aspired towards yeoman status and freedom of trade. The new union with Sweden, in 1814, allowed the Norwegians to form their own constitution one of the most democratic ones for the time being seen in a world perspective granted by the new Swedish king, Charles John (XIV), who in fact had been a former French revolutionary soldier under the name Bernadotte, and who had, significantly, broken with Louis Napoleon Bonaparte over the issue of the constitutional selfdetermination of nations, protesting against the emperors roughshod riding over the German states in this respect. As shown by subsequent developments, even if Bernadotte showed an expected respect, especially for the Norwegian yeomen, his successors at the throne had no revolutionary blood in their veins whatsoever, and had more than a handful with their determined leaders throughout the 19th century. Thus, a reasonably straight
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line is discernible between Lofthus and Soren Jaabaek, the yeoman republican who led the massive farmers movement in the decisive period between the 1860s to 1880s, when the very rural socio-economic structure was under massive onslaught by the delayed Industrial Revolution in Norway, the influx of foreign capital hunting for the timber resources up and down the country, and throughout the 19th century approximately one half of the Norwegian population fled the country gambling on finding proper soils across the Atlantic.

The Great French Revolution in Norway If the political reaction was not bad enough in DenmarkNorway after the execution of the Danish Danton, Struensee, and the abortion of his reform efforts, the ensuing reactionary Guldberg ministry, and the disgraceful treatment of the Lofthus rising, it was not even possible for commoners to gather and discuss political issues not to say organize after the outbreak of the Great French Revolution especially not in the more central areas. In the city of Bergen, whose citizens and visitors stood in an intimate contact with the French events through the foreign sailors meeting there, attempts by a band of youth to celebrate was briskly repressed. The revolutionary ideas of freedom were promptly
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banned, and according to Kristoffer Janson French revolutionary sailors were stunned by the degree of censorship coming from a country in which the publications of Enlightenment philosophs such as Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau had circulated for a generation or so by then. In an effort to explain the reactionary situation in Scandinavia at the eve of the Great French Revolution, the Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment philosopher, Claus Fasting, pointed to the intensity and scope of paternalism, pervading the European societies furthest to the North especially in the close vicinity of state officials and clergymen. Thus, after the rage of the Parisians ran wild over several betrayals by the French crown, clergy and aristocracy during the early revolutionary years, most notably in the so-called September Massacres of 1792 a Scandinavian was simply a criminal and a barbarian even if only mentioning the Revolution in a favorable manner. In societies still deeply imbued with religion, and only tentatively influenced by Enlightenment sentiments, militant political speech or activism was effectively subdued by labeling it godlessness atheism being far from a word of honor, and hardly distinguished from devil worship. Hence, it is no wonder that the next popular movement leading up to the constitutional turmoil in Norway in 1814 deeply influenced by the turn of events during Napoleonic Europe took the form
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of pious industriousness coupled with political quietism (Hans Nielsen Hauges pietistic movement, 1796-1804), and was led by a man who subscribed to the view that the reactionary turn of events in France during the Revolution represented gods punishment.

Lofthus fate and the aftermath of the Great French Revolution As the news of the French revolutionary events (178994) spread around Europe, at first evoking enthusiasm and expectations, only to turn into horror after the September massacres against imprisoned clergy members, the execution of the king and queen and the subsequent Reign of Terror public sentiment took a turn away from the Enlightenment ideals, tending towards republicanism and atheism and converged in renewed religious currents and the general Romanticism spreading all over the European continent and beyond, not least on the British Isles. A significant and illustrious difference between the spread of the Enlightenment ideas and ideals in France most notably Paris and the Norwegian regions, had been the numerous salons of the former most often conducted by women in which the public debates concerning the new ideas had taken place, while the
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public sphere in the North had largely been monopolized by priests who conducted their own censorship from the pulpit, and restricted their Enlightenment lectures to strictly practical matters such as the newest plowing methods, potato growing, and so on, while the burghers saw no need to enlighten rural people who threatened their privileges the nobility having long since been reduced to insignificance. The religiously conservative Norwegian peasants and yeomen, already suspicious of the clergy and their role in the state official apparatus, hardly appreciated being lectured in their own walk of life by these priests-turned-agrarian-pedagogues; quite to the contrary, they largely went to church out of custom and to hear gods words of justice and redemption. Thus, Enlightenment received a belated, slow and laborious birth in the North never to rid itself of deep seated religious sentiments and superstition, as manifested to this day in the existence of a state church in Norway. Thus, while the Lofthus rising had represented a largely secular and militant orientation, right at the eve of the revolutionary turn of events in France indeed, the French peasants were already revolting in some parts of France, such as Brittany at the Atlantic coast, within a year after Lofthus capture the next major popular movement challenging the absolutist Danish-Norwegian state, haugianism, took the form of a pietistic movement
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instigated by a yeoman dissenting preacher. In conventional history writing, these two risings are often equated with each other, but despite certain common features mainly regarding basic economic issues, their respective orientations were widely different let us say, paralleling the differences between a Thomas Paine and an Edmund Burke, who largely summed up the ideological clashes of the era. Another movement influencing upon the turn of events in 1814, and the struggle for liberalization of economic life and democratization of political structures, haugianism was named after its founder, the pietistic and philanthropic yeoman, Hans Nielsen Hauge. In 1796, Hauge started his mission which was a combination of a religious calling and an urge to inspire the farmers all around the country to utilize their abilities and resources in the best possible manner, in the service of their countrymen and god alike. Hauge opposed the rationalism which had marked the clergy throughout the 18th century, and called for a more pious attitude towards existential matters and in this way he embodied the new turn in the overall outlook in Europe at the time. In this sense, the haugianism movement represented a regression, seen from an Enlightenment perspective. On the other hand, there were definitively progressive elements as well, such as the demand for freedom of trade and occupation, which the movement combined
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with a stress on honest work, frugality and thrift almost like an echo of Benjamin Franklins creed throughout the Enlightenment on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit without the strong appeals of the latter to reason in a broader sense. As most often happens with such movements, reacting against any Dionysian cultural element, Hauge and his followers attacked every sort of joyfulness among the commoners, such as music and dancing which has always played such an important role for downtrodden people during times of stress and hardship. On the other hand, the dissenting spirit of their religious conduct and liberation from the clergy paved the way for a stronger independence of mind in the affected individual. Alas, some especially intellectually inclined peasants and yeomen still clung to the Enlightenment ideals, reading Voltaire and Holberg, among others, most notably along the west coast and the trade routes into the back country.12 Hauge himself was a rather clumsy writer, knowing no other written language than the foreign Danish, but he certainly won a lot of souls as a fluent speaker conducting preaching tours all over the country, establishing networks and helping farmers create various businesses, often against the law, and through widespread mutual aid among the aroused commoners.

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To illustrate the extent to which Enlightenment ideals was a struggling cause all along in the North while religious tolerance had long since been implemented in The United Dutch Provinces and Britain the Danish government issued a Convent Declaration in 1741, directed against freethinkers and aiming at establishing religious issues as a monopoly of the state. This edict was repeatedly turned against the haugianites, who solemnly replied to the authorities: Do you want to disturb goodness? Certainly, farming people with scarce agricultural lands, and denied the possibility to utilize fully their timber resources to a rational extent and in an ecologically sustainable manner, saw nothing but good in a campaigning which resulted in the establishment of their own paper mill and similar economic ventures. Although the movement connected with Hauge produced no militancy similar to the Lofthus rising, Hauge himself was arrested 10 times in 7 years and the customary faith that he formerly had in the king, faded gradually. In June, 1804 a further arrest warrant was issued against him, in which he was accused of drawing people away from useful work, breaking the Convent edict, and distrust towards the first authorities of the state. Then, after he was arrested 25th October the following autumn, he was held in custody year after year; however, he received an immensely milder treatment than Lofthus before him, and was released in 1811. The sentence
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against him was not presented until 1813, according to which he was convicted to two years chained labor, whereupon the Supreme Court reduced the sentence to a fine probably weary of highly probable sympathy actions even if not in a militant vein from his associates. His writings were declared illegal, and all the while he was imprisoned the movement itself was largely paralyzed, only to recover in the course of the subsequent decades. By the time their leader died in 1824, superficial liberal reforms had been incorporated in the constitution of 1814, and haugianism entered into the mainstream political landscape as its adherents won their respective seats in the national assembly to the great annoyance of Charles John (Bernadotte), who remained on the side of the radicals. At the height of the haugianism stirrings and paralleling the dramatic turn of events in Europe at large, ensuing from the imperially ambitious Napoleonic France the coastal Laerdal farmers rose in an antimilitarist rebellion in 1802. As a compensation for their governmentally imposed transportation duties up along an important communication route between Western and Eastern Norway, of which there were few in those days, they had traditionally been exempted from service in the army a right repeatedly confirmed, even as recently as in 1777. In other words, it was hundreds of years old and related to the complex issue of war, military conscription
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and increasing taxation throughout the centuries. Then, in 1799 the government ordered enrolment of the Laerdal farmers in the army, upon which the infuriated overworked farmers responded with immediate refusals and demonstrations; state power stood against regional and village power, the latter led by a man named Anders Ljoesno. The Laerdal locomotion farmers sent appeals to the king, while the rising threatened to spread into other western regions. Significantly, the army dispatched to quell the rebellion had to be sent from eastern regions, which had become increasingly inclined to obey the Crowns war orders. The general leading these subdued easterners, Mansbachs, slogan was Never trust a commoner!, and the Laerdal rebels were effectively surrounded without a fight. The leading figures were sentenced to labor in chains for a year to life time, while their prominent spokesman, Anders Ljoesno, however, was sentenced to death and executed in Bergen in 1803, after which he attained a martyr status in the area. The stirrings of the Strile farmers, the Lofthus movement and the Laerdal rising taken together, constituted a massive attack on the bourgeois state authority in the Revolutionary era in the colonial context of Norway. Moreover, the revolutionary scare was repeatedly fuelled by persistent civil disobedience against the burgher privilege system, which was only abandoned a generation or so after the adoption of a Norwegian constitution in
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1814; a constitution which turned out to be highly bourgeois in its orientation, despite massive campaigning from the farmers movement which perpetuated the demands from Lofthus, Hauge and their adherents. Thus, both before and after the constitutional work, rural people turned to various forms of direct action to state their cause in campaigns spanning from strikes to black marketing, and in the years preceding the granting of the municipal laws in 1837 even marches against parliament (!) such as the one led by Halvor Hoel in 1818. It is worth noting that the farmers campaigning after 1814 met with considerable understanding by the former French revolutionary soldier, Bernadotte who, curiously enough, suddenly found himself king of Sweden-Norway as an outcome of the Napoleonic wars. During those troubled war years there were serious famines in many parts of Norway, especially in Eastern regions where people could not subsist by availing themselves of fishery resources; thus, their hatred towards the bourgeois privileges intensified, especially regarding the lumber trade the main export since the 17th century, and a staple goods exchanging well with life saving grain from abroad. Thus, in well coordinated strike campaigns, the plank freighters organized effective strikes in solidarity with the forestry farmers upon which the authorities dared not intervene. Although the privilege system was not repealed as a result of their
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campaigning, they achieved better prices for wooden goods and transportation, only to rise again against the saw mill privileges in 1807 with demands wholly unacceptable to the bourgeois crown, but still a matter of life and death for the farmers in forest districts (of which there were many). The farmers had largely become yeomen by 1814, and although accompanied by a large class of cottagers, the various segments of the rural population complemented each other and fought common struggles all the way into the economic turmoil of the mid 19th century. In the constitutional struggle of 1814, the essence of their common program demands were circumscription of the state officials; freedom of conscience, speech and printing; and cancellation of the burgher privileges. Thus, the strength of yeomens zeal and organizing was decisive in the quest for independence among the troubled Norwegians, and it is not too much to say that they were duped by the upper classes during the decisive deliberations at Eidsvoll in April and May, 1814. In fact, the Norwegian constitution was not accepted by Bernadotte (Charles John), and after a brief war during late summer the same year, negotiations were held between the newly chosen revolutionary monarch of Sweden and his independence striving Norwegians negotiations in which the acknowledged farmer friendly state official, Wilhelm Frimann Koren Christie (from Bergen) played a
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central role as one of the revolutionary kings chosen negotiation partners. The final constitution was adopted on November 4th, 1814 a date somehow largely forgotten in Norway to this very day. It is worth noting that while the Norwegian farmers ascended to a proud class of yeomen by the end of the 18th century, their Danish brothers were held in the deepest subjection all the way until 1800 when the serfdom laws introduced in 1733 were abolished. These laws implied that the peasants and their families were tied to the land they worked on, to the benefit of the nobility and the bourgeois proprietors, and seem to be motivated by the authorities fear of too rapid and excessive urbanization (push and pull-causes in relation to the cities), and by the related effort to keep agricultural production at proper levels in an age when machinery had not yet replaced manpower and increased the productivity of each peasant to a significant degree. The invention of such machinery during the latter half of the century (for example sow machines, threshing devices, improved harrows, and so on), in combination with the enlightened ideas of the time, goes a long way to explain the decision to abolish the largely anachronistic feudal system (stavnsbaand) in 1788 the implementation of which decision was subsequently postponed until 1800.
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Conclusion: The position of the yeomanry by the end of the 18th century To try to draw up the main lines; even without its own political institutions, the Norwegian people laid a foundation for self-government during the 18th century. The yeomen achieved a pride unprecedented in the modern era, became literate, and started to read everything from the Sagas to scientific works on agriculture, topography and history; the bourgeoisie and the state officials became increasingly Norwegian in orientation, after having been recruited from Denmark, Germany and elsewhere throughout centuries. Profits were high for burghers in lieu of the mercantile privileges granted to the cities in the late 17th century, and it was especially from shipping and export of lumber goods that a veritable bourgeoisie established its stronghold; indeed, in 1795, free export from the saw mills was introduced, to the great profit of the bourgeoisie and to the great annoyance of the yeomen, who were excluded by law from taking part in it the crassly conflicting interests in which conflict were manifested in the Lofthus-rising of the 1780s. Anyway, for those who were entitled to commercial activities by the kings privileges, it was a golden age indeed. Within agriculture, however, real progress was made, culminating in the first school for
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farming at Ullevaal, conducted by John Collett in the early years of the 19th century; though it remains a largely uninvestigated topic to what extent the yeomen adopted the advanced methods of Mr. Collett at that stage in a period in which they endured a strained relationship with men like him, who belonged to the class of state officials. Nonetheless, the loyalty of the Norwegian commoners turned increasingly from the court in Copenhagen towards the respective regions in which people lived and worked, and the interdependence between them in an age when regional markets and age old trade routes had attained significant importance. Hence, when the Napoleonic Wars led to a clash between the economic interests of Denmark and Norway, respectively, in the wake of the British fleet robbery and the subsequent Danish adherence to Napoleons side and his war tactics in 1807, the Norwegian people was faced with a new challenge with respect to dealing with major issues on their own. They were forced, moreover, to deal with the well being of Norway as a nation, and not only as regions and individuals amidst war, blockade and illharvest; and a new consciousness and ideals of civic virtue fostered throughout Europe in the precedent Age of Enlightenment could take root to facilitate the processes towards self-determination, democratization and liberalization which were materialized in the
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constitutional work, significantly by the yeomen, in the spring of 1814 and the subsequent decades. The prominent role played by the yeomen themselves testifies to the broad popular movements which had been accumulating in the North in this era, illustrating their self-confidence in acting in the public sphere and taking crucial matters in their own hands. The nation issue, however, proved to be ephemeral to the yeomanry, who continued their municipal and regional political campaigning throughout the first generation of the national assembly; their main focus throughout this period was the consolidation of their local power as against the burghers and the state officials, and they achieved their long sought for municipal laws in 1837, after enduring efforts throughout these decades and a strong contingent in the parliament throughout the 30s. The next half century passed as before, with locally and regionally oriented rural populations and their leaders deeply involved in the economic take-off ensuing from the previous agricultural revolution, and only intensive campaigning during a couple of decades sufficed to orient them towards the national level, in the processes by which parliamentarianism was introduced in Norway in the 1880s. It is no accident whatsoever that the time period in which the degree of self-sufficiency in Norway started to decline, which it has continued to do ever since, converges precisely with the period in which mass
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democracy was introduced ultimately marginalizing any social group which may be occupied with basic production pulverizing political responsibility in general, and paving the way for socio-economical degeneration and cultural anemia. The combination of Norway being largely a province under Denmark throughout the centuries discussed in this essay, and the challenging topographic conditions which have always distinguished western regions from eastern ones, as well as northern from southern, implied in a still agricultural society a basically bioregional and libertarian, communalist approach among rural populations while the royally privileged burghers oriented themselves towards the Danish (and, from the 1850s onwards, Swedish) crown and expanding international trade. So, while it has become a clich that the farmers were largely loyal towards the crown, the point is seldom made that the burghers were entirely so until opportunist deliberations turned their minds, with Denmark-Norway being on the losing side in the Napoleonic wars. The confederal orientation among peasants and yeomen drew on traditions reaching hundreds of years back in time, as represented by the Gulating in Western Norway from the 8th century onwards, and the corresponding well organized trade systems in staple products up and down
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the coast. The memory of the Viking king, Olav Haraldsson (the Holy), who interfered with these structures in his quest for centralizing power in his own hands in the early 11th century, thus lingered on throughout the ages after he was chased out of the country. In the border regions between Norwegian and Swedish counties, there had been similar trade and exchange dating way back in time, among transnational people who had been accustomed to do without centralized state power and even turned proudly against it in times of war the kings wars. Only with a professionalized army were the kings on both sides enabled to incur military discipline in favor of the state. As we have seen these conflicting tendencies reached their apex in the Lofthus rising in the 1780s, and it was probably only the state authorities sly way of dealing with Lofthus and his numerous collaborators, which deflected the increasingly self-confident farmers from developing their confederal ties and organizational structure to an even more elaborate level in this Age of Democratic Revolution, when political ideologies were about to take form. Furthermore, what the politicoeconomic scenery would have looked like without the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, will forever remain a subject to thought provoking contra-factual hypotheses, especially when considering the immense boost
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nationalism received in Europe in the wake of that war period.

Notes:
1

See Torgrim Titlestad: Norge blir et rike (Stavanger: Erling Skjalgsson Selskapet, 2000).
2

Halvdan Koht: Norsk bondereising (1926: Oslo: Pax Forlag, n. d.).

3

Linnea de Gogues: From Witch Hunts to Scientific Confidence (Freeport: Nisus Publishing, 2013).
4

Victor Condorcet Vinje: The Versatile Farmers of the North (Freeport: Nisus Publishing, 2014).
5 6 7 8

Koht, op. cit. Koht, p. 145. V. C. Vinje, op. cit.

See Gerhard Schning: En rejse gennom Gudbrandsdalen i 1776 (Hamar: Thorbjoern Taalesen, 1926).
9

For a good analysis of these developments, see H. Arnold Barton: Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era,
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1760-1815 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

10

The Sagas were translated into Norwegian by historian, Gerhard Schning about this time, who also wrote extensively on Norwegian history himself, in the latter half of the 18th century.
11

For Quesnays economic perspectives, se his Tableu conomique, translated into English as The Economical Table (1758: Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004).
12

An effort to penetrate into the intellectual orientation among the public in various Norwegian regions in this era, is to be found in K. Janson: Vore besteforeldre (1848: Kristania og Kbenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag, 1913).
13

Janson, op. cit.

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