The Snapphanes, Scanian 17th-century guerrilla combatants oftentimes depicted as having been either freedom fighters or pesky thieves, still remain shrouded in quite a lot of mystery—and I’ve got questions!
I can’t find anything about them on Reddit, let alone elsewhere (for example, at the local library or via the limited amount of online databases that an unemployed history geek like me has any access to), so I thought posting here might hopefully be worth a shot!
As far as I know—which, to be honest, isn’t much—, they constituted the Free Corps¹ in order to defend the Danish Army against the Swedish Army’s rampant devastations across the then Eastern Danish provinces, which in the course of the Second Northern War (1655–1660) and the Scanian War (1675–1679) eventually became Southern Sweden.
Moreover and to the best of my, albeit limited, knowledge, the Snapphanes initially garnered quite a bit of peasantry support when attempting to rejoin the Danish sphere. But as Sweden managed to gain a firm upper hand by way of seizing Danish provinces, the peasantry’s support quickly turned sour. From this point onward, with confrontations and armed conflicts now growing increasingly desperate, locals began seeing them as “worse than the Swedish Army.”
Now, then, some questions have been raised whilst stuck pondering on and wanting to better understand this hectic part of Scandinavian history.
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Sorry for really late response.
>I can’t find anything about them on Reddit
I know at least /u/WolfeTones123 in fact answered recently to Levels of violence in the Scanian war in this subreddit. Their answer also illustrates the most basic problem, based on their divided historiography traditions (see below): 'Who were the Snapphanes?'
Frankly speaking, neither can I be qualified as an expert to answer this topic, but I will try to summarize some of historiographical discussions on the difficulty to discuss the Snapphanes below.
First of all, in contrast to their alleged popularity in Nordic popular history like the same title (Snaphanar) TV mini-series (2006) (linked to imdb.com), we have had very distinct two strand of historiography (research) of them respectively in Sweden and in Denmark, and this division can also almost date back to different contemporary source texts on them just after the Scanian war (Cf. Vadenbring 2010). That's probably at least one of why the topic on themselves has gets less and less place in academic historical overview like Norstedt's Sveriges historia (vol. 3), just three times in the whole volume of ca. 600 pages and almost less than one page in total (Villstrand 2011: 138f., 188, defined briefly as 'stråtrövere i södra Sverige (highwaymen in southern Sweden)'). It is also very difficult to find any non-Scandinavian research literature on this topic , especially in form of books, so it is not so likely to attract wider attraction in Anglophone world.
What I can illustrate below are just some of the points on changing understanding of the process of Forsvenskning (becoming/ making Swedish [of the Scanians]) and its implication on pre-modern 'national' identity problem in recent research (Gustafsson 2005; Id., 2008: 89-97).
>How did ordinary people live in terms of community, faith, food, housing, farming, etcetera?
Skåne in the 16th and early 17th century Denmark had been, so to speak, socially divided. Mainly in southern part of the region, large-scale (though not so concentrated geographically) landownership (ladegårde) of the local aristocrats, centered at the aristocratic manor (herrgård) was prominent (Gustafsson 2008: 90). Five prominent local aristocratic families, namely Beck, Krabbe, Ramel, Thott and Ulfeldt, monopolized ca. 50 aristocratic manors in ca. 140 places, about the third of the total aristocratic lands (then about the half of the land in Skåne) in ca. 1650. The division ratio of the landownership between the Crown and aristocrats (about 1:1) was almost the same as other regions in contemporary Denmark.
This ladegårde system was primarily organized by the (compulsory) service of nearby peasant around the aristocratic manor in weekdays (such peasants were called 'ugedagsbønder (weekdays peasant)', but the aristocratic landowners also build extensive social bonds with these nearby peasants, such as in form of the private local justice court (birkerätt- birketing). Several extant stone castles (slott) in Scanian landscape also represent the power of these aristocrats in the local society during Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. In short, ladegårde was a kind of independent domain of the aristocrat, and the practice of private justice court made them not so much different from royal lands qualitatively.
The clergy in Southern Skåne also functioned as a kind of middling sort between these aristocrats and their peasants. They also had some social connection with citizens of (rather smaller) towns scattered across the southern part of the region, such as Malmö and Ystad where international goods were exchanged. The rent register of a certain local priest shows that his family sold agricultural products (from the rent of peasants) in Ystad to buy some exotic luxuries like spices (Gustafsson 2008: 95).
On the other hand, there were also some more 'free peasant' communities left especially in the border areas like the northern forest frontiers in Skåne as well as in Blekinge and in Bornholm (where 700 of 900 farmsteads were owned by the peasant themselves), compared with the average situation of Denmark in general. I wonder whether the living condition in such communities were rather close to those who lived in the 17th century Norway (linked to my previous post) except for their interaction with the Sámi neighbors, but I don't have enough literature to check this point, sorry.
>How did either side (Danes, Snapphanes, and Swedes) view the issue of nationality?
Some recent research tend to downplay the significance of pre-modern nationality during the Scanian War. Gustafsson points out that the estates of the Scanians, especially represented by the local aristocrats (see above), also officially made an agreement with the king of Sweden in Malmö in 1662 (Malmö recesse) as well, and since then, the local elites were rather co-operative with the new rule of Sweden in exchange of the guarantee of their traditional privileges (Gustafsson 2005: 229). The foundation of University of Lund in 1668, formerly seen as an epitome of Forsvenskning from above, is also now re-interpreted primarily as a local initiative to adapt the new political-social circumstances. In short, the Scanian local elites like the old Danish aristocrats preferred rather living with their traditional privileges under new kingdom of Sweden, in fact a conglomerate of regions with different historical backgrounds (Gustafsson is also one of the most staunch advocates of such 'conglomerate state' complex polity in Early Modern Europe, see Gustafsson 1998).
On the other hand, at a first glance, Scanian peasant communities in the border forests might have seen the new regime from a different point of view: both classical Swedish and Danish historiography agree that the Snapphanes found most resonances in these border areas, though their interpretations are different. While Swedish side tend to focus rather on the strategic reason (the shelter provided by forest areas, see Vilkstrand 2011: 188), Danish overview points out the possible resentment of such local communities against the new, harder exaction like the conscription (Johannesson 1981: 253, 261). Anyway, however, this local opposition did not necessarily ascribed to the dichotomy issue of Danish/ Swedish national identities alone.
>How did things go down as Eastern Denmark and Southern Sweden (Blekinge, Halland, and Scania) were seized by the Swedish Crown?
Recent study also tend to regard the local Scanian support to the Danish army rather as temporary and opportunistic, as a background of their initial success. Once Sweden overturned the tide of war by some victories on the battlefield, the local population preferred the new ruler to the old one.
It is also worth noting, however, that the cession of former Eastern Denmark to Sweden as well as successive Scanian war roughly corresponded with the period of transition to the absolute regime respectively in Denmark and in Sweden. The monarch sought interaction with further communities of the subject hitherto rather neglected in older regime, such as peasants communities in the border area in Skåne. In this context, in order to establish (re-define) the new interaction between the ruler and local communities, it would have been useful for both parties to have the former villain in common: It was perhaps the representation of the Snapphanes primarily as plunderers narrated in Swedish texts (In short, they might have been used as a kind of rhetorical scapegoat for Scanian local population to reconcile with the Swedish authority).
Anyway, I assume you can read either Swedish or Danish, so if you are interested in more details, I'd recommend to check pdf files of either of Vadberg's article/ thesis, that are one of the few recent academic literature concentrating on the Snapphanes.
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