Köpa eller köpas? Åbors motiv för skatteköp under 1700-talet i tre härad

Abstract

In year 1701 the Swedish king Charles XII ordered the Royal Chamber of Commerce to sell Crown land to tenants or others who were willing to buy, in order to collect resources to carry on with the Nordic war against Russia and Denmark. However, since tax paid by famers was the main source of stately income this should not be done so that did hurt tenant farmers. Over the 18th century the laws regulating this selling successively became more advantageous to tenants. The research question of this study was what motivated tenants to spend money on buying the land they cultivated even though they still would have to pay the same rent to the crown as owners as they had as tenant. Based on earlier research four potential motives were identified. These were: fear that someone else bought their cultivated land, expectations of economic and/or social advantages as owners, having developed a commercial mind and therefore wanting to own land and following the examples of others. In order to evaluate which of these were at work three different districts in the south of Sweden were selected. These were regarded as reasonably different from each other to allow conclusions about what motives were influencing the decisions of tenants. The differences in the buying processes between the three districts were identified by help of the so called skatteköpsböcker, registers of buyers and land bought and so called jordeböcker, a kind of tax register. The prices that were paid were identified as were the prices on the open land market. Further, the frequencies by which other tenants, the closest neighbors, on the same so called hemman, taxable unit, did buy at the same time. No clear results were found only tendencies. It was expected that the presence of other potential buyers would make tenants more willing to buy. This seems to have been the case in one district. However in another district were many non-tenants bought land, tenant were more reluctant to buy. Maybe, because they did not want to provoke non-tenants to buy. However, as prices went down due to a large inflation over the 18th century many bought “their” land, indicating that some value was given to owning land. It was also found that in a majority of cases neighboring tenants bought at the same time. Something that may indicate that tenants were influencing each other. The suggestion that tenants were motivated by a commercial mind was disregarded since a conceptually simpler understanding was preferred and that there was no clear evidence of differences in degree in commercial activities between different areas.