term as such gives no clue to whether he was provided with a home for his family, or slept in the chamber of the farmhands, but had its own negative connotation, as farmhands traditionally were not supposed to marry. Background The parliamentary rule during the Age of Liberty (1718–1772) invited citizens to debate and discussion, to a freer formation of opinion, not the least on public affairs. After the Great Northern War, the monarchs were no longer trusted. And the landed nobility had lost its say in the Great Reduction of 1680. New ideas of rationalism, individualism and meritocracy found their way from the European continent to remote towns and cities in Sweden-Finland. Reforms Numerous suggestions were made to reverse the widespread poverty in the country. New crops and rational agricultural reforms were much discussed. Innovative entrepreneurs were hailed. The era saw the creation of a progressive "civil service nobility", i.e. civil officers who were ennobled before promotion to a governmental position that the nobility had secured sole rights to. Once nobilitated, they were free to buy tax-exempted land from the landed nobility. The statare-system was first proposed in 1750 as a combination of the manorial corvée system, and the established peasant system with unmarried servants living in the master's home. A kind of large farms were conceived, like plantations, that hardly existed anywhere in the country yet. Meanwhile, enclosure was enacted in several phases, starting with Storskiftet in 1757. The ideal became farms with one singular continuous piece of farmland, which should liberate inventive farmers from their conservative neighbors. Tenant farmers and freeholders did in fact use this freedom to experiment with new crops. But it would turn out that the most inventive were the new owners of manors, who followed news, were financially better connected, were unhampered by tradition and conservative landlords, and who in comparison with the previous owners, the ancient nobility, lacked sentimental feelings of responsibility for their peasants, nor did they see their land as merely a source of a yearly rent, but rather as a project to be refined and streamlined according to modern theories. Furthermore, from 1809, common people were allowed to buy tax-exempted farms from the landed nobility. Population growth Between 1750 and 1850, the population of Sweden doubled. New farmsteads could not compensate for this rapid change. Previously, custom had been that sons and daughters of freeholders and tenant farmers were