Book of Commerce as well as Nehrman’s “Introduction” seem to fit very well into a century-old and established legal tradition about status, the worker’s subordination and the master’s duty to take care of his servants. Nehrman presented the terms on inequality as being founded on natural law and expressed or “explained” by legislation. It is worth noting that he did not use natural law for limiting the masters’ prerogatives, as had been done as early as in the1670s by Claes Rålamb (1622-1698) who emphasised that the right to property also meant a lot of obligations.The owner was obliged not to abuse his property, and a master who used his servant, must not go beyond the natural limits of his own conscience of what was practically possible and of the established manners and customs.104 Likewise, Nehrman was far from questioning the system in the way that was to come in the1770s,when representatives of the nobility and the clergy, including Anders Chydenius (1729-1803), criticised the master-servant legislation for being inhumane and contrary to its own purposes.105 On the other hand, we have found that almost 150 years beforeWinroth published his dissertation in 1878, Nehrman elaborated contractual notions on the master-servant relationship and made a clear distinction between the hiring of things and the hiring of services. Furthermore, when Nehrman analysed the rules concerning master and servant from a natural and domestic law perspective, they turned out to agree very well with Roman law, which he declared that he opposed.106 He simply applied the Roman law concepts to the century-old Swedish legislation. Lars Björne has written that Nordic legal scholars of the 18th century often forced their local medieval law into a commonly accepted European terminology and thus created opportunities for the elaboration of a domestic legal science.107 c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 57 104 Rålamb 1679, pp. 34-36. 105 Chydenius,A1788/1880, pp.361, 346;Utterström1957, pp.30-31;Adlercreutz,T1971, pp. 64-65. 106 Björne 1995, pp. 252-261. 107 Björne 1995, pp. 377-378.
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