Conclusion: Resisting, Cooperating, and Fighting

The three-fold division of this book—how these peasant elites and the peasantry in general confronted the authorities, how they dealt with them, and how they acted within their own local communities and networks—has aimed to place their aggressive and violent behaviour in the framework of Nordic state formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The focus has thus been on their relationship with the state and its representatives. This structure contained per se a conflict of interests between states that wanted to intervene and control local communities and the leading peasants in these communities who wanted to guard their favourable positions. At the same time, there were possibi…