The export of butter from Finland to Stockholm in the 1540s

Abstract

Stockholms Vågbok (weighing‑house book) of the year 1548, Handelsregistren (trade registers) for the years 1545, 1546, 1549 and 1550 and the accounts for Varuhus och handling, Stockholm in Riksarkivet (the Swedish State Archives) were studied in order to try to establish the size and the im­portance of the butter export from Finland to Stockholm in the 1540s. According to the weighing‑house book (1548) 90 per cent of all the purchased butter with indicated place of origin (total amount 7000 lispund) came from Finland, especially from Satakunda (Satakunta), Egentliga Finland (Varsi­nais‑Suomi), Ostrobothnia (Pohjanmaa) and Nyland (Uusimaa). The burghers were predominant in the butter trade except in Ostrobothnia (with no towns).

The total supply from both wholesale trade butter and retail business butter in the 1540s appears in the trade register of 1546, where also the about 500 butter purchasers in Stockholm are recorded. Half of them were buyers for household use, who all together bought 5–10 per cent of all the butter on the Stockholm bridge (Skeppsbron), whence 16–17 000 lispund can be estimated to have come from Finland, which means more than twice as much as the wholesale trade butter recorded in the weighing‑house book of 1548. The sharpened control of the peasant sailing at the middle of the 1540s forcing the peasant sailers to go to Stockholm, is likely to have effected a temporary increase in the Finnish butter supply. Finnish butter was also brought to Stockholm as taxation butter and was afterwards exported. About 80 per cent of the butter export from Stockholm to foreign countries during the second half of the 1540s consisted of Finnish butter.