490 stayed in an inn too long and that no one was too drunk, or made more noise, than was tolerable. During market days these watchmen received reinforcement which, especially during the 19th century, resulted in a number of notations in the lists of fines. Some acts, e.g. drunkenness, were regarded as criminal only when they took place in public places and there were more of these in the towns. In the country it was primarily the church, the church lane and the court meeting place which could be called public places. It is important to remember these facts when comparing the number of fines in towns to those in rural areas. If we are interested in the behaviour of the individual then we must count on the ‘dark figure’ being much higher in rural areas than in towns. If it is the conduct of the controlling apparatus we are concerned with then we must remember that there were several institutions, which we can not reconstruct via judgement books and lists of fines. It is true that the town guilds exercised a controlling function, but quantitatively they were probably of less importance than the village council of elders and parish councils in rural areas. In all the courts the majority of plaintiffs as well as defendants were living in the appropriate area, but in the towns strangers were more frequently cited. This was true especially in certain types of crimes of order and unlawful trading. In the case of lesser fights, drunkenness, verbal disturbance etc. the towns’ higher figures are created partially by those passing through and by countrv dwellers coming into towns to buy and sell. All in all more people were fined, as could be expected, in the towns than in the rural areas i relation to population. Regarding crimes of dispute and order the figures were most often around ten times higher in Linköping and Härnösand than in Gullberg and Säbrå. This concerns the lesser crimes of order in particular, but there were also more disputes involving physical violence. In Linköping these figures increased from being four times higher during the first half of the 17th century, to becoming six times higher at the beginning of the 19th century, when compared with the district of Gullberg. The number of persons convicted of murder and manslaughter was two to four times higher in the towns. The comparative figures for Härnösand versus Säbrå for all crimes involving some form of physical violence were ten times as high during the period 1680-1729, five times as high during the years 1730-1789 and again ten times as high between 1790-1839. We have established that this does not necessarily mean that the inhabitants of a town were more inclined to disputes and unruly behaviour, but rather that these were caused by the town’s character as a meeting place for public activities. It should also be pointed out that extra emphasis was placed on the supervision of the young and the propertvless, primarily in Linköping, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. In some towns the social effects of the increase in population and proletarianization came to be more noticable in the courts. That traces of these factors were so few in the rural courts IS probably due to a certain extent to the problem being experienced as
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