Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1938, Page 248

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LE NORD
teenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century which did away
with the old village community and
resulted in the emancipation of the
peasants in most European coun-
tries.
For more than three centuries the
peasants in the Eastern islands of
Denmark had been villeins, which
means that they could not leave the
estate on which they were born, and
they were furthermore obliged to
become tenants of such farms as the
lord of the manor chose to assign
to them; for the Danish yeoman had
gradually fallen to the level of a
tenant. This villeinage was abolish-
ed in 1702, but in 1733 came the so-
called “Stavnsbaand”, a measure
covering the entire country and suc-
cessively extended so as to shackle
Danish peasants to the estate on
which they were born, from their
fourth till their fortieth year. Over
and above this there was the com-
pletely uncertain legal position of
the tenant farmer, the heavy bur-
dens — often quite unpredictable
—- of a personal and economic kind,
especially the corvée. Moreover, the
whole system of agriculture, which
made the manor-farm and its work-
ing the economic centre and in-
volved a system of common tillage,
paralysed all initiative and hamp-
ered all progress. It is not sur-
prising that under such conditions
the Danish tenant farmer sank into
a state of lethargy, ignorance, and
sloth. Even under these conditions
there still continued to be an agri-
cultural class in the Danish com-
munity, but it was a peasantry with
no pride in its trade. There was no
real farming class in Denmark till
the farmer obtained his personal li-
berty on June 20th, 1788, by the
abrogation of the “Stavnsbaand”
and by the reforms connected with
that event.
It was a Royal command that
rescinded the “Stavnsbaand”, and
it is indeed a curious fact that the
Danish absolute monarchs were al-
ways the farmer’s friends and the
protectors of peasant farming. De-
velopments in Denmark have not
taken the same course as in other
European countries, like e. g. Great
Britain and Prussia, where, owing
to the lack of protective legislation,
the independent freehold farms
gradually disappeared, leaving a
system of agriculture in the form of
large landed estates and a wretched
population of labourers, gradually
disappearing into the towns. As
early as 1683 the Code of Christian
Vth (and other earlier legislation)
had established a prohibition against
the merging of one farm into
another, and this principle has been
upheld in Danish legislation ever
since, the last occasion being the Act
of April 3rd, 1925, concerning the
so-called maintenance obligation for
farm properties.
The abolition of the “Stavns-
baand”, too, was due to the com-
mand of a king and a king’s (or, to
be more exact, a crown-prince re-
gent’s) recognition of the greatest