Contested households : lodgers, labour, and the law in rural Iceland in the early 19th century

Abstract

The historiography of labour in pre-industrial Iceland has commonly portrayed it first and foremost as life-cycle service in rural households and has suggested that, in a European context, the Icelandic system of compulsory service–or vistarband–was exceptionally harsh due to its broad scope and inflexibility. This approach has been built primarily on demographics and a normative analysis of legal sources. Less attention has been paid to the everyday practices of workers and their employers (or the state) as they manoeuvred within and around the labour legislation to establish working relationships to make ends meet. Similarly, ambiguities within the legislation and discrepancies between law and practice have rarely been explored, nor has people’s understanding of the principal concepts of the labour laws, concepts such as ‘household’, ‘farm’ and ‘servant’, been scrutinized. This article invokes such questions and provides a microhistorical analysis of two court cases which illustrate the nuances and ambiguities of putting such a broad-reaching set of regulations into practice in a pre-industrial rural setting.