Tullbergska rörelsen : Striden om den skånska frälsejorden 1867-1869

Sammanfattning: This thesis is a study of landownership that took place in Scania in southern Sweden in the 1860s. Basically it was a conflict between an alliance of tenant farmers and rural poor against estate owners in a time of agrarian change, a time characterized by mass evections of tenants and increasing proletarization. The participants of the movement, led by the self-taught lawyer Samuel Tullberg, claimed that the tenant farms of the Scanian estates were not rightfully owned by the nobility but belonged to them. The participants of the Tullberg movement used a plethora of methods to achive their aims, ranging from court summons, strikes, squatting and rural terror to petitioning and founding newspapers. And they wrote voluminously during their struggles, to king, parliament, courts, authorities and newspapers. This attempt by landless people to win landownership ended in complete failure in early 1869. Through an analysis of the actions and words of the participants in the movement, the thesis aims to reconstruct their culture. The analysis is based on how scholars as E. P. Thompson, Charles Tilly and James C. Scott has thought about popular culture and contention, social contract and everyday resistance. The status of the tenant farms was central in the world view of the participants of the movement. They envisioned what they called "peasant right", basically a natural right to landownership. All land was rightfully owned by "peasants". The estates, they claimed, had been abolished in the past and the nobility had gained ownership of the tenant farms through manipulations and violence. The participants of the movement contrasted the present with an utopian past, with no nobles and estates, and only freeholding peasants. In many ways, the culture of the participants was a traditional one. The king and nobility had obligations to protect the commonweal and uphold the law. In the olden days they had done so, but not any longer. Since they had failed in their paternalistic obligations the social order was under threat and the struggle for landownership legitimate. Thus, the culture of the participants included cultural elements known since medieval times. Yet it can not be called traditional. Phenomena as custom and religion had little place in it. And the participants were influenced by contemporary radicalism. Demands for universal suffrage were occasionally made. The Scanian popular culture of the 1860s was in a state of change, mixing old and new cultural material.