educated as servants on other farms before marriage and before inheriting a farm of their own. Now more and more farmhands wished to marry without access to a tenant farm. Evictions of peasants Until 1660, Danish laws and customs gave considerably more freedom to noble land holders than the Swedish. During the long Great Northern War(1700–1721), noble military officers had had good opportunities to compare their own limitations with the liberties of noble estate holders in contemporary Livonia, Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, as during the Thirty Years' War. With Sweden's Law on Privileges for the Nobility (1723), the conditions were reversed, granting the Swedish nobility unlimited rights to corvée-work from their tenant farmers, and also freedom to evict them at will. Around year 1800, preconditions for the statare system were present at manors in the Mälaren Valley (i.e. the greater Stockholm region). By then, roads were improved, goods could be transported in wagons, and enclosures were either finished or soon to be. The demesnes of the manors became increasingly dependent on corvée from tenant farmers, crofters and cotters. Tenant farmers on many noble estates were evicted, abruptly in some places. Instead of their corvée, the manors employed day laborers and farmhands of a new kind: older, experienced, and married. The evicted tenants were by law required, like anyone else who didn't own their house, to accept any employment they could find, even a position as a farmhand, disgraceful for a married man as it was. Tenants under the church and the crown were indirectly affected, as tenure became scarcer. This development occurred similarly in the southernmost province of Scania, although a generation later. The explanation for this delay is usually presented in terms of corvée being easier to exact in the formerly Danish provinces (Scania, Halland, Blekinge). Statare as a social issue Industrialization had arrived late in Sweden, but in the 1920s this new change in Swedish society contrasted starkly with the poor conditions for statare families; their circumstances were increasingly seen as a disturbing relic of pre-modern society. Between World Wars I and II, it became a theme in public discourse: The housing situation was regarded as very poor. The barracks-like rural family dwellings, that estate owners had built for their contract-workers, were unpleasant, crowded, drafty and dirty. The employee on a one-year contract had no incentive to improve their dwelling. Neither had the employer. The working