Sleeping in Grand Central

“Två Knallesocknars Krönika: Toarp och Rångedala 1700-1850” is a book by ethnographer and folklorist Carl-Martin Bergstrand, whose book about Swedish Travelers I review elsewhere on this blog. I bought this book, published in 1932, mostly on a whim, hoping it would contain folklore. It doesn´t. However, it seems Swedish reality 1700-1850 is just as interesting…

Toarp and Rångedala (both localities still exist) were small farm villages during the period in question. Both are situated in Knallebygden or Sjuhäradsbygden in Västergötland. The main city of Knallebygden is Borås. Knallebygden is named after “knallar”, itinerant salesmen who bought locally produced goods and sold it at markets in other parts of Sweden. While this sounds like no big deal, it *was* a big deal in Sweden during the period in question, when internal trade was strictly regulated by the king´s government. Only the merchant guilds had the right to buy and sell goods in the manner just described, but the peasants in Sjuhäradsbygden simply didn´t give a damn, and continued to complement their farming activities with itinerant selling despite the merchants´ monopoly. Eventually, the Swedish government relented and granted the “knallar” the privilege to conduct long-distance trade despite not being properly bourgeois.

What most struck me when reading about ordinary life in Toarp and Rångedala 1700-1850 was the constant conflicts between the locals and the Church (the Lutheran Church of Sweden). Attending church services was compulsory, which can´t have been popular, since the common people constantly created virtual pandemonium in church, probably deliberately so. Attending church service in Toarp circa 1800 was like sleeping in Grand Central! The minutes from the meetings of the local council (“sockenstämma”) are filled with complaints about heavily smoking farmhands outside church, loud chitter and chatter inside it, rowdy maids stealing the seats reserved for the farmers (i.e. their employers), children who climb on top of the actual altar (sic), people who deliberately get seated at places where they can neither see nor hear the priest, and so on. The weirdest complaint is that the locals throw their walking sticks at the church windows, thereby breaking them! One local denizen was fined after it transpired that he had literally stole communion wine and bread from the Church in order to feed him and his family. Somehow, this doesn´t square with my view of Old Sweden, in which cowed peasants piously listen to Lutheran sermons about justification by faith alone…

I also get the impression that the clergymen were quite literal party-poopers, trying to prohibit fun and merry-making in general as being “sinful”. Sumptuous and week-long wedding celebrations were particularly galling to the priests, with all the feasting, drinking, and generally superstitious behavior. Still, it´s funny to see where the guardians of common morality drew the line. Thus, it was decreed by the council that nobody should be allowed to have more than five drinks at a wedding feast. At least today, that would be considered quite enough! The community elders were proud of the dour traditional dresses of the Toarp peasantry, but the peasants themselves (or at least their wives) seem to have preferred the same multi-colored dresses as were fashionable elsewhere.

Working on Saturdays and Sundays was verboten (funny, didn´t Jesus say the opposite?), and a lot of complaints deal with people who were doing just that. According to a medieval superstition, working the fields on the Feast of the Ascension was especially auspicious, and some people in Rångedala believed it as late as 1687. Naturally, maypoles were prohibited, being seen as “pagan”. That the prohibition was renewed year after year of course suggests that many locals raised them anyway… (Today, maypoles are sometimes raised *by* local churches, so the times have certainly changed!)

On the more positive side, the Church did try to take care of the poor, often failing in its endeavor due to the stinginess of the “knallar”. A constant problem was that poor people from outside the parish came to Toarp to beg, while Toarp poor often visited other parishes with the same aim in mind. This was then used as an excuse by many peasants not to help anyone. The council tried to solve the situation by deciding to expel all beggars from outside the parish, while promising to take back beggars from Toarp roaming other parishes, but it´s not clear whether the decision was ever carried out. The locals were admonished not to give anything to beggars who couldn´t show a proper identification badge. Expulsion was also used as a threat against underclass people deemed too difficult to deal with, but it seems to have been difficult to enforce in practice.

Interestingly, there was a local “upper class” in Rångedala, consisting of ex-officers who had served in the Great Northern War (and its southern permutations). Some of them had been POWs in Russia for over a decade. The most prominent “karolin” living in the area was Herman Johan von Campenhausen, who had served under Karl XII at both Poltava, Bender and Fredrikshald. It seems Campenhausen once saved a particularly stingy local council from acute embarrassment by paying the church´s bell ringer for some extra work from his own funds, when the council simply refused.

Since most of the material is from the 18^th century or early 19^th century (some even from the late 17^th century, despite the book´s title), we never really learn how Toarp and Rångedala managed the transition from the old ways to something approaching modernity around 1850. It´s clear from the description that little Rångedala in particular was overpopulated, and the population of Toarp also increased. Yet, modern agriculture was still a thing of the future.

Overall, a quite interesting little study. No longer available at the used book store near you, since Ashtar the Über-Reviewer bought the last copy!