Terminology/Dictionary - Land

Reforms, Sweden

Allmänning - Common land

Common land (Allmänning) means land owned (or used) jointly. It often consists of woodland, pasture or sandpits, and includes associated water (lakes, streams, etc). Ownership (or use) may be managed by a community (e.g. a village) or by the Crown (Crown commons). Village commons were owned jointly by the farmers who farmed them. Since earlier times, the village farmers had the right to divide the village common and undivided forests belonging to several villages between themselves through land redistribution. A jointly owned area (samfällighet) consists of land, facilities, rights, etc. belonging jointly to several properties.

Bondby - Farming village

Farming village or agricultural village (bondby), a village with an agricultural population of farmers. (SAOB)

By - Village

Village (by) can denote a named place consisting of at least two neighboring farms and possibly several cottages in the countryside. It can also denote a legal designation for a collection of farms that are or have been a community for joint ownership and the use of certain land or forest - so-called commons (farming villages). The latter definition applied before the land reforms of the early nineteenth century to Swedish and Finnish land parcels shared by several farms. The term is used primarily to refer to agricultural villages.

Byaman

Byaman/byman, a person who owns land in a village and resides there (the landed people in a village). (SAOB). It is byamän/bymän in plural.

Bymål

Bymål, a legal unit of measurement used in the calculation of the size of the various farms, which governs the size of the shares distributed in the division of a village's farmland; the size of a village's farms calculated according to this unit of measurement; the basis of division applied in the land redistribution; the share which, according to the applicable basis of division, accrues to the various farms in a village's land; the (proper) ratio between the various farms in a village concerning the shares in the village land that have been redistributed. (SAOB)

Bystuga - Village Hall

A village hall (bystuga) is a jointly owned house in a village, often used for village council meetings or activities. Many older village halls can be found in Dalarna, where the villages were never split up in connection with the enskifte land reform.

Bystämma - Village Council

The Village Council (Bystämma) was the institution in which the landowners/shareholders of a village were organized and the council was led by a village elder (byaålderman or byfogde)) who was appointed by the byamän (landowners of the village) to lead the village's activities and the rules of the villages were written down in a Village Ordinance (Byordning). The members of the council are called the byalaget. These had similar legal status in terms of voting rights at the Village Council (Byastämman). Among other things, the Village Council appointed the village's representatives to the Parish Council (Sockenstämman). The members of the village council are the byamän, i.e. those who own land in the village (more than a plot) and thus hold an agricultural property. The village council governed the village according to customary law, often codified in a specially written village ordinance, an ordinance about the common affairs of the village legalized by the district court of law. The village elder is elected by merit or in turn according to a rotation system. The village ordinance regulated obligations and rights concerning common property, management of livestock, etc. After many villages in Götaland and southern Svealand were split up following several land reforms in the 18th and 19th centuries - storskifte, enskifte, and laga skifte - the village law became less important there. In Dalarna, Hälsingland, Jämtland, and other provinces in central and northern Sweden, however, most villages remained intact, and village law (byalagen) have continued to play a natural role there.

Fälad - Pasture

Fälad is an old South Swedish word for pasture (betesmark) on what were commons or outfields. Fälad were usually found on poor, hilly, and stony land with scattered trees and shrubs, land that could not be used as fields or hay meadows. An enefälad is defined as a pasture with a high proportion of junipers (en). To preserve the character of a fälad and prevent it from growing back into woodland, trees, and shrubs must be thinned and the land grazed by, for example, by sheep or cows.

Gradering - Grading

Grading refers to the valuation of land based on its yield potential. The soil was given a certain grade number so that a larger area of poorer quality soil was given in exchange for a certain area of better quality in the land reforms.

Gärde - Field

Gärde has come to designate the continuous arable land belonging to redistributed parcels. Before the land reforms of the 19th century, each field was divided into long strips of tilled land, called “teg”, belonging to different farms, and the infields of Swedish farming villages were usually divided into two or three fields (gärden), depending on whether they practiced two-field or three-field farming. Some of these fields were left fallow each year or were used for grazing. Between the fields, cattle paths were leading from the village to the outlying fields where the cattle were grazed. A southern Swedish term for “gärde” in the sense of arable land is “vång”.

Klungby - Cluster Village

Klungby, a village consisting of a collection of farmsteads situated in sparse or irregular clusters adjacent to a village road or crossroads, "group village". Composite cluster village; a cluster village (klungby) consisting of several groups or clusters of farms. (SAOB)

Lycka

Lycka is an enclosed piece of cultivated farmland, field, or meadow, which is located at some distance from the main farm or the place where the owner lives.

Radby

Radby, a village in which the plots and farmsteads are in a row (single row village) or two rows (double row village) along the village street; long village. (SAOB) In a row village, the farms are in a row, usually along the village street. In connection with the land reform in the 19th century, most of the row villages disappeared.

Skifte - Land Division

Skifte; land division, land redistribution, or division of ownership (ägoskifte), is a land surveying procedure in which land is divided between two or more owners. The division of land into new properties is also known as land consolidation (arrondering). The division takes place within a limited area, known as a parcel of land (skifteslag), usually consisting of the land of a village. Such land reforms have been important for the development of agriculture.

Skifteslag - land to be redistributed in the

land reforms

Skifteslag is a land surveying term referring to the area in which a division of land is conducted. The term has been used in land division legislation since the middle of the 18th century, when the storskifte land reform was introduced, and subsequently for the enskifte and the laga skifte land reforms. A division land parcel (skifteslag) usually covered a village, but in some places, it could cover entire parishes. The main rule was that the scope of a division parcel of land at the storskifte would also apply to the laga skifte. In these cases, the skifteslag denotes a geographical area, but the term sometimes also refers to the co- owners of the geographical area.

Säde - Crop Rotation

Crop rotation (växelbruk) is the practice of growing a series of different types of crops in the same area across a sequence of growing seasons. It reduces reliance on one set of nutrients, pest and weed pressure, and the probability of developing resistant pest and weeds. Ensäde (monocropping), also known as enskiftesbruk, was a form of unilateral cultivation in which grain was sown in the field year after year without being left fallow in between. This method of cultivation had several disadvantages: the soil could not be kept free of weeds, grain cultivation had to be restricted to spring-sown crops, and a lot of fertilizer was needed. Mono-field farming is the oldest type of cereal farming, but it existed in Sweden as late as the 19th century. Especially in the north of Sweden where it was difficult to grow cereals other than barley, but also where livestock raising was the principal farming and there was therefore an abundant supply of manure. Tvåsäde (two-field system or two-field rotation), also known as tvåskiftesbruk or halvsäde, is an old system of farming, in which the fields were left fallow every other year and every other year bore grain, usually autumn-sown wheat or barley. It occurred in most countries but was less widespread than the three- field system (tresäde). In the mid-19th century, two- field farming was still the predominant method of cultivation in Mälardalen and Västernorrland county and in some parts of Östergötland and Älvsborg counties, but, like three-field system, it has given way to more recent cultivation systems. Tresäde (three-field system), also known as treskiftesbruk, trevångsbruk, and tredingsbruk, is an old system of farming, which involves dividing a field into three parcels. One of the fields is left fallow while the other two bear ripening grain, usually autumn-sown grain next to the fallow and then spring-sown grain - these are then rotated each year. The three-field system needed more plowing of land and its introduction coincided with the adoption of the moldboard plow. This crop rotation began to be used in the 700s and came into general use when Charles the Great ordered it to be introduced at all the crown estates instead of the haphazard rotation of crops that had been common earlier. By the end of the Middle Ages, three-field cultivation was the most widespread form of cultivation in most of Europe. As a number of long- established practices and legal provisions (village ordinances) were based on three-field system, it was persistently maintained and only abolished in the context of the agricultural reforms that began to be implemented in most countries in the latter part of the 18th century. In Sweden at the beginning of the 19th century, it was the predominant system of farming in Skåne, Småland, neighboring parts of Östergötland, Värmland, Närke, Gotland, and Öland, and in some parts of Blekinge, Halland, Västergötland and Dalsland, and the counties of Gävleborg and Västernorrland. As more and more of the meadow was converted to arable land, it became necessary to move from three-field farming, which provided no animal feed other than straw, to crop rotations that also included fodder cultivation. This and other reasons led to the abandonment of three-field farming in the 19th century.

Teg

Teg is a strip of tilled land or meadow. The division into these strips of tilled land (Teg) was a medieval form of land ownership in a farming village, where each farm field and meadow in the village is divided into strips owned by each farmer, and no farmer has his own field or meadow. This form of ownership dominated peasant farming throughout Europe from the Middle Ages until the agrarian revolution of the 18th century when village ownership was redistributed so that peasant properties were coherent land, separated from the others. The idea behind this system was that land of different qualities would be fairly distributed among all the peasants in the village. In the case of inheritance, these strips could be further divided up for fair distribution among the heirs. Before the Storskifte land reform began in 1749 in Sweden, all farmers in a village, owned a part of each piece of arable land and meadowland. When new land was broken, it was also divided into plots. This was called tegskifte (Teg division)

Vång - Field

Vång was part of a village's farmland at the time of the three land reforms in Sweden, before the enskifte reform. The term is East Danish/Skåne and corresponded to the agricultural term gärde in the rest of Sweden. Prior to the enskifte land reform, the farms in a village were usually grouped in a cluster. The arable land was usually divided into three fields (vång). One of the fields was sown with spring cereals (barley), the second with autumn cereals (rye), and the third was fallow (three-field system). On the fallow field, the animals grazed during the summer. Cultivation on the meadows alternated from year to year so that each meadow was fallow every three years.

Related Links

• Agricultural Land Reforms in Sweden • Land Reform Maps, Laga Skifte, Kumla village, 1833, Toresund Parish • Agricultural Yields and Years of Famine • The Old Agricultural Society and its People • The Concept of Mantal etc. • Landownership - Farmers & Crofters • Crofts and Crofters • Summer Pasture • The "Statar" system (keeping farm laborers receiving allowance in kind) • The Conception of the Socknen (parish) • Property Designations - Sweden

Source References

• Skiftesreformer i Sverige; Stor-, en- och laga skifte, Örjan Jonsson JK92/96. • De stora förändringarna, 23 Enskiftet och laga skiftet. • Skiftenas skede, laga skiftets handlingar som källmaterial för byggnadshistoriska studier med exempel från Småland 1828–1927. Ander Franzén, 2008. • Tegskiftet s. 112-114 i Gadd, Carl-Johan (2000). Det svenska jordbrukets historia. Kapitel 8, Band 3, Den agrara revolutionen : 1700-1870. Stockholm: Natur och kultur/LT i samarbete med Nordiska museet och Stift. Stiftelsen Lagersberg. • Bilden av skiftet måste nyanseras, artikel i tidningen Populär Historia i september 2003 av Fredrik Bergman, Larserik Tobiasson. • Skiftena förändrade Sverige, artikel i tidningen Släkthistoria i mars 2017 av Therese Safstrom. • Lantmäteriet (The National Land Survey of Sweden) • Wikipedia • Nationalencyklopedin (Swedish National Encyclopedia) • SAOB (Svenska Akademins Ordbok - The Swedish Academy Dictionary) Top of Page