Considering there is much in common in regard to race, religion, language, character, and civilization, between the inhabitants of that interesting little country and its maritime neighbours—the populations, more especially, of England and Scotland, it will be instructive, on the eve of the agrarian revolution with which the United Kingdom is threatened, to study and analyse the statements and conclusions of Mr. Laing, and to trace the subsequent and present operation of the peculiar land laws which he so highly extolled in the earlier part of this century.
With that object we proceed to describe, almost in Mr. Laing's own words, the condition of the peasant proprietors of Norway at a period (1835) when, out of a population of 1,194,827, only about eleven per cent. inhabited towns, the land in rural districts being held by 103,192 proprietors and tenants, the proportion of the two latter being respectively seventy and thirty per cent.
'The Norwegians,' wrote Mr. Laing, 'are the most interesting and singular group of people in Europe. They live under ancient laws and social arrangements totally different in principle from those which regulate society and property in the feudally constituted states. Their country is peculiarly interesting to the political economist. It is the only part of Europe in which property from the earliest ages has been transmitted upon the principle of partition among all the children. The feudal structure of society with its law of primogeniture, and its privileged class of hereditary nobles, never prevailed in Norway. In this remote corner of the civilized world we may therefore see the effects upon the condition of society of the peculiar distribution of property; it will exhibit, on a small scale, what America and France will be a thousand years hence.... Here are the Highland glens without the Highland lairds.... If there be a happy class of people in Europe it is the Norwegian Bonde, king of his own land, and landlord as well as king.'
This state of happiness is, according to Mr. Laing, the result of the still existing Odels ret or Allodial Right, under which, he asserts, the land of Norway was always the property of the people, not of a feudal class of high nobility. But although this assertion does not much affect the main and practical object of our enquiry, it may be as well to point out at once that, whatever might have been the inherent right of every Norwegian to a portion of the soil on which he was born, Dr. Broch, an eminent native authority, maintains that a considerable portion of the land belonged anciently to the kings of Norway, and had been acquired, as in other countries, partly by confiscation from nobles. Those lands were leased and, gradually, to a certain extent, sold. In the days of Roman Catholicism, the Church also held great landed estates, which the State appropriated at the Reformation. No inconsiderable part of the State domains was then leased, and, in short, before the middle of the seventeenth century, leases comprised a little more than half of the landed property of the country; while even in 1814, they constituted one-third of it. Later, the State lands, and those which had been distributed among nobles at the Reformation, were repartitioned among the bulk of the population or sold.
But to return to the Odels ret. It gives, Mr. Laing shows,
'to all the kindred of the Odelsmand in possession, in the order of consanguinity, a certain interest in it. If the Odelsmand should sell or alienate his land, the next of kin is entitled to redeem it on paying the purchase-money; and should he decline to do so, it is in the power of the one next to him to claim his Odelsbaarn ret.'
At the present time, the allodial right is acquired only by the uninterrupted possession of the same person, his descendants or his wife, during a period of at least twenty years, and it is lost if the property has been in strange hands for three years. Testamentary dispositions, in the case of persons leaving issue, are now limited to one quarter of the testator's property; whereas before 1854, a testator could not bequeath anything individually. Since the year 1860, also, there is perfect equality between the two sexes in the division of real and personal property. At the period when Mr. Laing visited Norway, the division of land among children had
'not had the effect of reducing properties to the minimum size that would barely support human existence. One sells to the other and turns his capital and industry to pursuits that would enable him to acquire the necessaries of life. The heirs who sell, very often, instead of a sum of money, which is seldom at the command of the parties, take a life-rent payment or annuity of so much grain, the keep of so many cows, so much firewood, a dwelling-house on the property, or some equivalent of that kind. Few properties have no such burthens.' He argued that 'in a country where land is held, not in tenancy merely, as in Ireland, but in full ownership, its aggregation by the death of co-heirs, and by the marriages of female heirs,[5] will balance its subdivision by the equal succession of children; and also, that in such a condition of society, the whole mass of property would be found in such a State to consist of as many estates of 1000l., as many of 100l., as many of 10l. a year, at one period as at another.'
'Norway,' our author urges, 'affords a strong confutation of the dreaded excessive subdivision of land. Notwithstanding, the partition system, continued for ages, it contains farms of such extent that the owner possesses forty cows.'
On the whole, the farms appeared to him to be of various sizes: many so large that a bell was used to call the labourers to or from their work; while some were so small as to have only a few sheaves of corn, or a rig or two of potatoes, scattered among the trunks of the trees. These, however, were occupied by the farm servants, or cotters, paying for their houses and land in work (Husmœna). Twenty to forty cows could be counted on the large farms. In the district of Verdal (Trondhjemsfiord) Mr. Laing saw beautiful little farms of forty to fifty acres, each having a pasturage or grass tract in the mountains, where the cattle were kept during the summer until the crops were taken in, and upon each such out-farm, or Sœter, there was a house and regular dairy, to which, he informs us, 'the whole of the cattle and the dairy-maids, with their sweethearts, are sent to junket and to amuse themselves for three or four months of the year.[6] We can well believe that, in such circumstances, Mr. Laing found 'this class of Bönder the most interesting people in Norway,' and that 'there are none similar to them in the feudal countries of Europe.' He appears to have been more particularly impressed with