Swedish "Mantal" historical help
Hi, I am struggling to understand the old Swedish "mantal" for land taxation and productivity. In my example, I am looking at a Swedish 1790s map of a specific town area and my ancestors is stated as having 5/36th of a mantal. We know approximately which properties are involved. But there are about 5 other land owners, So "mantal" is difficult to understand. Is the entire map of this town - one mantal? Or do I need to see this differently. For example my ancestor is in parcel B. And within B are parcels, a,b,c d, m,k etc. He owned some of these. Understanding "mantal" will help me discover exactly the parcels owned.
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Here is a general answer what "mantal" means (in Swedish):
Translation via DeepL:
QUESTION: I have noticed that there are often numbers (fractional numbers) next to people's names in household registers. It seems to be a question of farmers. Sometimes there are whole series of calculations. What are they about?
**ANSWER The notes concern the size of the farms owned by the persons. Sometimes the priest has made a note of this in the household registers, sometimes not. This varies between different times and different places. Other sources where you can find a farm's mantal size are estate inventories, mantalslängder and land surveying documents.
The word mantal is already used in Old Swedish for the number of men or people. It appears in terms such as mantalsregister, mantalslängd, mantalsskrivning. In the context of real estate, 1 mantal denotes a homestead (a farm) which, at the beginning of the 17th century, was considered capable of supporting a family. Fields, meadows, forests and fishing waters were taken into account. However, the size of a household is not directly related to the area of land.
Many farms were not so viable, and were therefore given a smaller size, for example 3/4 mantal. In addition, during the 18th century, land was divided up, so that a normal-sized farm became much smaller than it had been previously. It is a question of a shift in the carrying capacity that a mantal was considered to represent.
To some extent, more land was also gradually obtained as agriculture developed. In the 19th century, homestead sizes of, for example, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 or 1/64 mantal are common, while a homestead of 1 mantal is a clearly wealthy farm. Estates comprised several mantal.The farms could be tax (skatte), crown (krono) or feudal (frälse) farms (mixed forms also existed). Tax farmers were more independent and generally better off than crown and feudal farmers, who paid the crown or nobles to farm the land.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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Another definition from the Swedish Genealogy Society:
Translation:
Mantal is a measure of the productive capacity of a household (a farm). This means that two farms of 1/8 mantal should give the same yield to their farmers (and the same prosperity if the farmers were equally skilled). However, the territorial area of the farms could be completely different, depending, among other things, on the soil (one farm could be small with fertile fields, another large with poor fields). In addition, other assets such as access to useful forests and fishing waters were taken into account when calculating mantal.
Mantal was a unit of measurement used primarily for taxation. Two farms that were both 1/8 mantal would pay the same amount of tax, while a farm of 1/4 mantal paid more tax.
The origin of the word mantal can be found in the fact that a homestead (a farm) that could support a family was originally assigned the value of 1 mantal. Over time, the unit changed so that farms of 1/4 and 1/8 mantal could also support families.
It is therefore worth noting that the mantal changes over time, so that 1 mantal in the 17th century does not correspond to 1 mantal in the 19th century. In the 19th century, a farm of 1 mantal was a very large agricultural unit.
To confuse matters, there was also a completely different tax called mantalspenning. It was a personal tax that had nothing to do with the "farm measure" mantal. Mantalspenning was a tax paid by all adults of working age in Sweden from the beginning of the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The tax is recorded in the mantal registers, which are an important source of personal history.
The tax paid by the peasants on their farms, the so-called ground tax, was recorded in the land registers, a source that can also be useful for genealogists, especially in the 16th century (the tax was then often called 'annual interest'), but not nearly as important as the mantalslängderna.
The original meaning of the word mantal was 'number of men', i.e. how many men of war the farm would support.
Mantal also survives in the 'mantalslängderna', a well-known research material for all genealogists. The history of the registers dates back to 1625, when the 'mill duty' was introduced - a production tax whereby each barrel of flour milled was subject to a fixed fee. As the consumption of flour in a household was directly proportional to the number of household members, the mill duty was eventually replaced by a direct personal tax called the 'mill duty number money'. For the collection of the tax, special lists of the taxpayers were drawn up, the "mill duty rolls". In 1635, the mill duty was converted into a permanent personal tax, the 'mantalspenningar', which were registered in the mantalslängderna and remained in place until 1991. It can thus be said that the old mantal survived in both senses into our own time.
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