Vägar inom räckhåll : Spåren efter resande i det förindustriella bondesamhället

Sammanfattning: This thesis addresses the importance of human patterns of movement and interfaces in the local community and the constituents of peripheral forest communities, taking roads and human patterns of movement as the starting point. Questions are raised concerning how people have related to roads and travel - institutionally or flexibly. Great importance has been attached to illuminating various aspects of human range, i.e. the distances people travelled in different respects, using empirical studies to plot people’s ranges. Another important concern has been with the mental prerequisites of this travelling, the range.Everyday journeys in the local community have been charted on the basis of outfield use, diplomas, court records and parish registers. These journeys have been categorised as local outfield use, economic, political or social travel. It was also the intention here to present a kind of counterpoise to the lingering image of the isolated forest-dwelling peasant. The road studies were aimed at mapping the continuity or discontinuity of the individual roads.The results of the present enquiry, taken together, show people in the local communities concerned to have been relatively flexible in their attitude to local road use, while economic, social and political travel appears to constitute a relatively stable social phenomenon, an institutional trait/tradition. The local flexibility of road use can in itself be described as a virtually institutionalised behaviour, seeming as it does to have characterised the area for a long time. The findings have shown that travel in the region bore the imprint of mental preparedness for travelling far, even though travel also differed somewhat on the local plane. So it appears the myth of the isolated forest farmer can be finally laid to rest. In cases where travel was divided up in time, the findings indicated that with the passing of time journeys grew shorter.