Fátækt og fúlga. Þurfalingarnir 1902. Höfundar Jón Ólafur Ísberg og Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon (2016) (original) (raw)
Related papers
1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2020
Abstract: Legal restrictions on vagrancy and day labour in Iceland became increasingly strict in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating with a decree in 1783 which prohibited any form of masterless labour and proscribed compulsory service on a yearly basis for most people over the age of eighteen. Despite strict regulations and the strenuous efforts of various state officials to uproot the problem, vagrancy and day labour remained relatively common and publicly acknowledged throughout the nineteenth century, thus highlighting the contrast between normative prescription (such as law) and everyday life and the ambiguity of power relations in rural Iceland, underscoring their contested nature. This article discusses how vagrants and illegal day labourers in Iceland in the early nineteenth century found ways to evade the authorities and make a living for themselves on the margins of society. It stresses the agency of the working poor and highlights some of the survival strategies employed, including passport fraud, the careful exploitation of cultural notions of hospitality and methods of earning social capital by providing useful services. The article builds on the case of a travelling healer and vagrant named Árni Sveinsson who was found guilty of vagrancy, forgery and quackery in 1821. His trial provides rare insights into the tactics employed by those on the margins of the law to get around undetected.
Contested Households: Lodgers, Labour, and the Law in Rural Iceland in the Early 19th Century
Scandinavian Journal of History, 2023
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.
A Medieval Welfare State? Welfare Provision in a Twelfth-Century Icelandic Law Code
The history of law in Iceland is remarkable for both the respect with which the Icelanders held the law and the attention to detail and concern for the well-being of the population as a whole which the law showed in its canons. Several law codes were published in the era of the Icelandic commonwealth in the tenth to twelfth centuries. At first these were oral, but later written down and codified into a complex and comprehensive system of conflict resolution and provisions for social security which aimed at securing the peace of the land. Each of these law codes reflected the political, religious and social concerns of the country and of the population as a whole. Particularly outstanding in this respect is Icelandic law's concern with the care of the elderly and for those in need. As far as can be ascertained, Icelandic law's concern with this question; the detailed nature of the law's definition of the rights and responsibilities of children to their parents and its concern for the maintenance of the needy goes much further than any other law code in contemporary Europe. It is the purpose of this paper to present an outline of the rules for social welfare contained in the twelfth-century Icelandic law code, the Grágás. The intention is not to speculate at length about the origins of these rules, nor is this the place for an analysis of the way in which these laws fit into the history of European law. Such an analysis must wait until more is known about welfare provision in other countries around the North Sea and in the Baltic Region and about the reception of the Christian faith's precepts about such matters. Instead, this paper aims to present what appear to be unique early rules for welfare provision in medieval Europe.
Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England
Social and Education History
The main focus in her work is extend the current knowledge about childhood in medieval rural England. For this purpose, she analyzes orphans and underage heirs' situation in the Black Death age. At the same time that the findings are presented throughout the chapters, seeks to awaken interest in expanding research on medieval rural environments as the purpose of demystifying the dichotomies that she believes persist around childhood in environments not urban. Her reflections and critical views have the intentions to contribute to current childhood studies and claiming the role of children in society even in that time.
Review of High-Ranking Widows in Medieval Iceland and Yorkshire
This book is a welcome addition to the available scholarship about medieval women and will be of interest to scholars of a wide range of disciplines across the medieval field, such as gender, law, demographics, monastic, and sociopolitical history. Although the focus is on widows, the study inevitably deals with other aspects of women's lives: their entry into marriage and how their status changed; their ability to acquire and control property; childbearing, remarriage, and the effect of infertility; women's relationship with natal and marital kin as well as political figures such as kings or chieftains; the impact of the Church's doctrines on women's lives and their donations to religious establishments.