Suchergebnisse

Greinin er framlag til rannsókna á vinnulöggjöf á Íslandi. Með tilskipun konungs um lausamenn frá 19. febrúar 1783 var afnumin sú heimild húsagatilskipunar frá 1746 að einstaklingar sem ættu tiltekna lágmarkseign gætu unnið fyrir sér án þess að vera vistráðnir hjá bændum. Reyndar var enn gert ráð fyrir því að hægt væri, gegn ströngum skilmálum, að fá tímabundið leyfi hjá sýslumönnum til að vera í lausamennsku, einkum við sjávarsíðuna. Í greininni er rakin umræða embættismanna um þetta málefni á áttunda áratug 18. aldar og grafist fyrir um það hvernig tilskipunin sjálf varð til í samhengi við aðra löggjöf sem laut að því að hafa hemil á íslenskri alþýðu. Í viðauka eru gefnir út lykiltextar, þar á meðal tilskipunin sjálf á dönsku og í tveimur samtíðarþýðingum á íslensku. Ljóst má vera að löglegir lausamenn voru sárafáir, bæði áður en tilskipunin tók gildi og næstu áratugina, en þeim mun fleiri voru þeir einstaklingar, einkum karlar, sem vildu vera lausir en máttu það ekki samkvæmt lögum. Yfirvöld gerðu hvað þau gátu til að hemja slík tilþrif en höfðu sjaldnast erindi sem erfiði. Helsta niðurstaða greinarinnar er að lausamennskutilskipunin 1783 hafi litlu breytt á vinnumarkaði og að áhrif hennar á atvinnuhætti landsmanna og efnahag landsins hafi verið ofmetin.

Probate documents, inventories of property, and deeds of partition between heirs have for some decades been used with impressive results by historians and other scholars working on topics such as living standards, patterns of consumption, and material culture. The aim of this article is to explain divergent rules on the partition of inheritance that determined the production of these documents, as they came to be defined by legislators in the two Nordic realms in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Danish and Norwegian law codes of 1683–1687 stipulated that an inventory of property was only required when the heirs were minors, absent, or not the direct descendants of the deceased, whereas the Swedish Law Code of 1734 allowed for no exceptions and ordered that all inventories be held by the local courts. It did not require an officially attested deed of partition, which had been made obligatory in the Danish and Norwegian codes, valid also in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. This legislation was applied with only minor changes until late in the nineteenth century. A preliminary estimate of documentation from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Nordic archives is presented in the latter part of the article, and indicates that probate records concerning almost a million individuals are preserved, the great majority from the last decades of that period. There will be great variety in the preservation of records according to place and date, but in Sweden and Finland the documentation will mainly consist of inventories of the belongings of all kinds of people, with few deeds of partition of inheritance. In Denmark and Norway one can expect a large number of probate records containing a partition of inheritance, most of them with details of the portion allotted to each of the heirs, and even the inventories, while the probate population will be more limited than in Sweden and Finland and the age distribution will be different, due to exemptions from the requirement to draw up inventories.

On 2 January 1625, the English ambassador Robert Anstruther met with King Christian IV of Norway and Denmark and requested his participation in a union of Protestant states against Emperor Ferdinand II and the Catholic League in Germany. Within three days, King Christian proposed to contribute five thousand soldiers for one year, as part of an army of almost thirty thousand men. In early June, despite opposition from the Danish Council of State, reluctant to put a huge amount of money into foreign affairs, Christian decided to join what he called "the war for the defence of Lower Saxony". He then headed an army of mercenaries southwards through Lower Saxony, secured all crossings over the river Weser and prepared to confront the Catholic forces. On 29 November, it was decided that Denmark would be in charge of military operations in Northern Germany, whereas England and the United Provinces would provide a monthly subsidy. The political and military prospects for Denmark were excellent, to say the least. It had the fourth strongest navy in Europe (after Spain and the two new allies), and only a few years before the Danish warships had been described by a French observer as "merveilles de l'océan". A small standing army of two regiments had recently been established and Denmark was the fourth European state to do so after France, Spain and the neighbouring Sweden.