c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 329 terms about an essential inequality between the parties including the worker’s subordination to his master. Many of the parties’ obligations according to this contract were fixed in advance and could be upheld by criminal law sanctions. The worker’s duty of obedience, prescribed in the Book of Commerce in the Code of 1734, was systematically connected to police law and theVagrancy Acts, which since medieval times had prescribed a duty of annual employment for every person who did not own a certain amount of money. Nehrman’s writing of 1729 marked an important point in Swedish legal history insofar as he adapted the dispersed domestic rules to a scientific system, and combined them with a Roman law apparatus of concepts, which presupposed the worker to be an individual party to a contract.Accordingly, he placed the Swedish master-servant relationship under the heading of locatio conductio operarum. For the worker, the outcome of this free contract meant subordination as well as an open-ended duty of obedience, while the master was obliged to take care of his servants. The patriarchal components of inequality, the worker’s subordination and the master’s obligation to take care of his servants, etc.,were quite comfortable together with a contractual approach. Thus the general European tension between contract models influenced by “Romanistic” contract law and patriarchal (“Germanistic”) master-servant law, which have been analysed by, among others,Alain Supiot, is also obvious in Swedish legal history. Both doctrines could be well accommodated within the same legal system and social ethics. The worker’s freedom of contract meant a freedom to chose to what master one should submit or what collective body to represent one’s best interests. It corresponded to the master’s farreaching duty to take care of his family, to feed, lodge, protect and bring up its members. The worker’s subordination, which was prescribed to promote the common good, was considered as
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