44 the yeomanry and land owned by the nobility, as well as the effects upon the peasants’ cultivationof land caused by changes in the burden of taxation and the demand for the peasants’ products and labor. Behind this viewlay the research of the latest decades on the seventeenth century, research that has not only refuted the older research but that has also approached the seventeenth century withnewquestions in which thetransformation of society has toa greater extent than earlier inspired the choice of problems. A particularly fruitful angle of approach has been to study wars and the army’s significance for the process of change, that implied a significant growth in government taxation and the public sector with among other things, an increased control of the citizens as a result. The comparatively privatesector — in the formof the utilization of resources by the nobility — has also shown itself to be worth consideration in questions of economy and social structure. This new direction is much the product of the research on the seventeenth century with an orientation toward the finances of the state and toward socioeconomic questions that has been conducted in Uppsala since the end of the 1950’s. The body of the article was devoted to a presentation of some investigations which touchupon the above-namedskattefrälsefrågan and which resulted in an entirely newview of seventeenth century peasants and their lords. This reevaluation concerned not only the freeholders under the nobility but also all categories of peasants under both the Crown and the nobility. That pertained also to the so-called rule of the nobility. Among other things it is apparent that seventeenth century freeholders comprised a comparatively favored category of peasants in the political and social as well as the economic sense. Their representation in the Riksdag appears to have been strong, their land ownership was respected in those situations where it had practical importance, and they were not subjected to unlawful increases in taxes under the nobility. In relation to the tenants (Landbor) they could more easily meet their obligations which were a result of the increase in the taxation of the tenants by the Crown during the late sixteenth century, that is, before the partitioningof the large estates and rents. The possibility for an upward adjustment was not utilized by the estate owners, whose collection of taxes from freeholders and fromtenants, for the most part, corresponded to the amount that these peasants were freed from payingtothe Crown. The threat to land ownership and tothe agrarian economy was thus not primarily derived from the nobility as estate owners but rather from the policy of expansion and especially fromthe very great increase in taxes based upon war finances in the first half of the seventeenth century. In reality the rule by the nobility must have implied a relief for the peasants (both the freeholders and the tenants), above all, because the peasants under the nobility faced less risk of meeting death as conscripts than the Crown peasants, and perhaps also, because many tenants had a significant portion of their increased taxes transformed into day-work obligations that were often used by the nobili-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=