Editing History of Finland (section)

===Peasants===
[[File:Eero Järnefelt - Under the Yoke (Burning the Brushwood) - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|280px|Eero Järnefelt, ''Burning the Brushwood'', 1893]]
While the king of Sweden sent in his governor to rule Finland, in day to day reality the villagers ran their own affairs using traditional local assemblies (called the ting) which selected a local {{Lang|sv|lagman}}, or lawman, to enforce the norms.  The Swedes used the parish system to collect taxes. The {{Lang|sv|socken}} (local parish) was at once a community religious organization and a judicial district that administered the king's law. The ting participated in the taxation process; taxes were collected by the bailiff, a royal appointee.<ref>William K. Carr et al., ''Area Handbook for Finland'' (U.S. State Department, 1974) p. 10.</ref>

In contrast to serfdom in Germany and Russia, the Finnish peasant was typically a freeholder who owned and controlled his small plot of land. There was no serfdom in which peasants were permanently attached to specific lands, and were ruled by the owners of that land. In Finland (and Sweden) the peasants formed one of the four estates and were represented in the parliament. Outside the political sphere, however, the peasants were considered at the bottom of the social order—just above vagabonds.  The upper classes looked down on them as excessively prone to drunkenness and laziness, as clannish and untrustworthy, and especially as lacking honor and a sense of national spirit. This disdain  dramatically changed in the 19th century when everyone idealised the peasant as the true carrier of Finnishness and the national ethos, as opposed to the Swedish-speaking elites.

The peasants were not passive; they were proud of their traditions and would band together and fight to uphold their traditional rights in the face of burdensome taxes from the king or new demands by the landowning nobility.  The great [[Cudgel War]] in the south in 1596–1597 attacked the nobles and their new system of state feudalism; this bloody revolt was similar to other contemporary peasant wars in Europe.<ref>Kimmo Katajala, "Okänd bonde" ['The unknown peasant. The manifold faces of the peasantry from the Middle Ages to modern times'] ''Historisk Tidskrift,'' 2006, Issue 4, pp. 791–801</ref>  In the north, there was less tension between nobles and peasants and more equality among peasants, due to the practice of subdividing farms among heirs, to non farm economic activities, and to the small numbers of nobility and gentry. Often the nobles and landowners were paternalistic and helpful.  The Crown usually sided with the nobles, but after the "restitution" of the 1680s it ended the practice of the nobility extracting labor from the peasants and instead began a new tax system whereby royal bureaucrats collected taxes directly from the peasants, who disliked the efficient new system. After 1800 growing population pressure resulted in larger numbers of poor crofters and landless laborers and the impoverishment of small farmers.<ref>Antti Kujala, ''The Crown, the Nobility and the Peasants 1630–1713: Tax, Rent and Relations of Power'' (Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 2003)</ref>