143 that they and other noblemen ran estates more efficiently than did the crown, and that their ownership of estates was of great advantage to the general welfare and finances of the realm. By the middle of the seventeenth century, approximately two-thirds of the total number of farmsteads in Sweden and Finland were in the hands of the nobility, and by the privileges granted to it in 1644 the nobility had freed itself frompractically all royal taxes.*'* The indirect taxes proved insufficient to cover the salaries of the civil administration and the armed forces. Conscious of the consequences of the policies that had been followed, the kammarkollegium attempted, upon its own initiative and in connection with drafting the state budget in 1652, to put an end to the alienation of crown estates.** That same year, complaints poured in from both military officers and civil servants over the fact that they had not received their salaries; their economic situation seemed hopeless.*- The college succeeded in establishing the practice that all contemplated donations of crown lands would be referred to its officers for advice before being finalized. A royal resolution of 1652 declared that “before any donation or enfeoffment of estates is issued by the royal chancellery, the advice and correction of the kammare will be solicited first, and there it will be seen whether or not there exists any obstacle.” *'* Finally, upon assuming the presidency of the kammarkollegium in 1653, Herman Fleming went even further and attempted to give the state budget a more secure basis by introducing permanent allocations for each budget post and not allowing them to be exceeded in any given year. But the distribution of crown lands to the nobility continued, and in 1655 the high nobility agreed to a partial resumption of crown estates known as the fjärdepartsräfsten. A quarter of the estates donated by the crown after 1632 were to be returned to the state in order to cover necessary public expenditures, but this agreement also failed to produce any decisive alleviation of the situation.** During the 1660s, antagonisms between the service nobility, which was dependent for its livelihood upon the salaries derived from government service, and the high nobility, which lived on Incomes from agrarian rents, became acute.*'’ The economic situation of civil servants and "• Nilsson (1958), 71—72. " Ibid., 89. Clason, 166. *'* Instruktioner II, 55. Jerker Rosén, Tiden före 1718, vol. 1 of Svensk historia (3rd ed., 2 v., Stockholm, 1969), cd. by Sten Carlsson and Jerker Rosén, 457. Stellan Dahlgren, Karl X Gustav och reduktionen (Uppsala, 1964), 228—245. Civil servants belonging to the high nobility were not as dependent upon their 13a
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=