{"id":7771,"date":"2019-06-01T07:00:03","date_gmt":"2019-06-01T06:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/martinroe.com\/blog\/?p=7771"},"modified":"2020-07-11T11:53:22","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T09:53:22","slug":"the-care-for-the-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martinroe.com\/blog\/the-care-for-the-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"The care for the poor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a look into how the communities took care of the poor people.<\/p>\n

Feartured photo: Painting by Norwegian Christian Krogh: “Kampen for tilv\u00e6relsen” – The fight for a life<\/p>\n<\/div>When I wrote my article The pension of the past<\/a> that tells about people who were able to “work up” care in their old age, I promised to come back with an article about those less fortunate.<\/p>\n

Already in the laws dating back to the Gulatingsloven (Law of the Gula court) from about the year 1000, we find the mentioning of the family and society’s responsibility to care from the poor. (Kluge 1973:9)<\/p>\n

There was a distinction between worthy and unworthy poor people. The first group consisted of children, widows, and others who had difficulties because their provider had passed away or become incapacitated. The unworthy group was people who were considered employable but were begging due to drunkenness, laziness or moral degradation.\u00a0 Being a psychiatric nurse, I\u00a0<\/em>can’t help thinking that many persons who had some sort of psychiatric challenges, unfairly were put into the last group. The first group was helped, the second was not (Mykland 1975:154). The unworthy poor were often placed in various correctional facilities.<\/p>\n

After the Lutheran Reformation and the church lost its economic power to act as a communal caretaker, various regional laws (stiftsanordninger) starting in 1741 tried to find ways to organize the care for the poor (Gj\u00e6revoll 1992: 110).\u00a0 While the tone in these varied from district to district, there was a clear change from earlier times wish to do away with the vagabonds and the beggars, to a more humanistic realization of the society’s responsibility (Masdalen).<\/p>\n

When we deal with care for poor people in Norway, we soon come across the word “legd\/l\u00e6gd”.\u00a0 The “legd” means that a person unable to care for him\/herself was sent from farm to farm. They stayed there and were cared for a certain time. This care was also called “husgang”. This is a lesser used word though. The concept of legd is found back to the 1200s (Hatland 2019).<\/a> The legd was used in rural areas.<\/p>\n

We must not confuse this concept with the so-called “Soldatlegd”. This was the responsibility of a certain number of farms to equip and support a soldier in the army. <\/div><\/div>\n

\"\"The concept of “legd” has changed over the centuries and has also been practiced differently from district to district. This means we have to generalize a bit and look at some common traits. I will, for the most part, try to look at the “legd” in the timeframe where we find most sources. A lot can be said about the emotional aspects of the “legd”, both for the caregivers and the care receivers, but I will leave this to each one of us to imagine.<\/p>\n

In the 1801 census, we find about 3400 people listed as being under the “legd” system. We find about 4900 people if we search for “fattig* (poor). While there is a few localparishes and farms missing in the census data, according to the census as registered in the Norwegian Digital Archives, the population of Norway counted 883 487 persons. While we are into statistics, we may also note that 8,8% of these lived in the towns (Wikipedia<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Within the legd concept, there were different ways a person could be helped (Mykland\/Masdalen 1987:131)<\/p>\n