Winroth, however, now presented a “teleological” approach that facilitated a selection of master-servant rules be applied to other labour relationships, outside the traditional agrarian and domestic areas of Swedish labour life. His contribution can be described in two steps. First he wanted to extend the formal application of the masterservant relationship in the Statute of 1833 on Servants and Hired Labourers. It was true, Winroth wrote, that in practice it was principally used in manual, domestic and agrarian labour. He also admitted that the Statute of 1864 on Free Trade contained rules that regulated the exceptions from the rules concerning master and servant. Having paid this reverence to customs and legislation, he readily changed to expressing a political view by claiming that if the scope of the master-servant concept was thus limited, the institution would lose a lot of its “purpose”. According toWinroth, the servant could be used for other tasks, not only as an additional purpose, but also as a main purpose. Consequently, the master-servant relationship could also concern intellectual tasks, even those which included the supervision of other workers.Winroth did not even consider it as a necessary requirement that the servant was a member of the same household as his master, but got his remuneration solely as a wage.240This conclusion did more than deviate from a century-old ambition of keeping master and servant physically closely together. Furthermore Winroth tended to depreciate the legislative text as a legal source in favour of new customs, more concretely those patterns of behaviour on the labour market, which he considered to be in line with politically desirable purposes. Winroth thus rejected an opinion which we have seen elaborated by among others the law professors at Uppsala in1821, King Karl XIV Johan as legislator in1833, the majority of the Supreme Court in 1836, Carlén in 1843, Schrevelius in 1844, Olivecrona from the 1850s, Palmén in 1859 and Hultgren as late as in 1878. p a r t 1 i i , c h a p t e r 4 112 240 Winroth 1878, pp. 7-8.
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