Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society by Raisa Maria Toivo

Author:Raisa Maria Toivo [Toivo, Raisa Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351872621
Google: ppKoDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05T01:45:12+00:00

Work as personal worth

It is not surprising that the idea of work as a basis for personal worth also infiltrated the peasantry. Work is indeed among the things which were considered worthy of reward. When disputes arose over the harvests of newly ploughed fields or about fields which had been worked on in common by two households, the parties often tried to appeal to the work they had invested in the matter, claiming that they should have respective shares of the produce; for example, when elisabeth Johansdotter, the widow of the former mayor of Pori, reclaimed some hay which agata had collected from her fields, Elisabeth stated that her folk had cleared the meadows in the first place.13

Similar occasions when work created property rights occurred when the disputes touched cleared meadows on the shores, forests cleared for slash-and-burn or beasts and hunting: things the legal ownership rights of which did not exist or were confused.14 If that was not the case, however, the legal and customary rights were more important: the Tommila brothers tried to use their work as a basis for their claims in the inheritance struggle; they said they had worked the farm, and should therefore be considered the first entitled to the land. This was a good argument, too, because agata could not claim the same: she and her daughters were women, they had not been formally responsible even when Agata’s husband had been alive, nor had they even lived on the farm for the past few years. The jury, however, remarked in Agata’s favour that her husband had also worked the farm before he had to go to war and indeed supported the younger brothers by his work. Therefore, the jury said, where the other brother’s had worked the land, they had also enjoyed the produce: they had been living on the farm and its resources, both when they worked it themselves and when agata’s husband had worked it.15

The above example illustrates that there was a peasant notion that work created a share in property and that the value placed on work was strong among the peasant farmers. Nevertheless, while primogeniture was not a legal stipulation, it was part of the customary law. For the judges, concerned with customary law, primogeniture was more relevant than work.

It can be assumed that the Tommila brothers directed their appeal especially to the peasant jury, who were farmers themselves. They valued not just the work in itself, as ability and diligence, but also the interdependence between the village farmers: the workload of each and the success of everyone were dependent on the ability of all members to carry their shares of the load. For the peasant farmers, who depended on it, work was a virtue in a somewhat more practical sense than in the Lutheran ethic of vocation. Work was not just something which imposed obedience, duty and self-sacrifice on everyone; it was also a virtue as such. The ability to provide for oneself – in any way except those determined criminal – brought status.

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