Storskifte Historical Maps of Sweden

Sweden Storskifte Historical Maps of Sweden

The storskifte was the first land reform in Sweden. The purpose was to streamline the farm production. Up until this time, the farm lands had evolved under a system of fairness which meant that farmers were compensated for having good productive or poor land. In some cases, smaller farms had good productive soil and farms with poor soil were granted larger areas. In other cases, long skinny lots were created that had equal amounts of good and poor soil. Each farm also had their own “portion of use” of the village, its meadows, and fences. This structure created some problems because many of the farms over time became long strips of land that were challenging for the farmer to manage. The storskifte consolidated the smaller pieces of land into larger fields for better management. The storkifte law of 1757 limited each farm to a maximum of 4 strips per enclosed field or meadow. The process of storskifte created about 40,000 maps that have been scanned and are available through the lantmäteriet website. For those villages that were never mapped in the äldre geometrisk kartor, the maps for the Storskifte might be the first map of the village. The maps for the storskifte were done between the 1750s and 1820.