A mantal () is an obsolete unit once used in
Finland
Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...
and
Sweden to measure the size and productivity of a piece of land. In the 1900s, the mantal lost its relevance because crown land taxes ceased to exist and the government started drawing revenue from income taxes. Today, mantal values are only used in connection with some rural obligations and rights, while the size of farms in Finland is reported in hectares.
A mantal measures both physical area and monetary worth as it takes into account the productivity of the land. It is a
cameral measurement instrument used to gauge the wealth of a farm to determine its
apportionment. According to Sjöström, in essence the mantal values for farms in a village show their share of the village's lands.
A
landed estate
In real estate, a landed property or landed estate is a property that generates income for the owner (typically a member of the gentry) without the owner having to do the actual work of the estate.
In medieval Western Europe, there were two compet ...
's share of the joint properties of a village (such as bodies of water, undeveloped
common land
Common land is land owned by a person or collectively by a number of persons, over which other persons have certain common rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect wood, or to cut turf for fuel.
A person who has a ...
, and some specific things) is defined by its mantal value. The mantal value was also used as a basis for
taxation
A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, o ...
. A farm had to pay a fixed annual
land tax and several other taxes (i.e. auxiliary taxes and
tithe
A tithe (; from Old English: ''teogoþa'' "tenth") is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to government. Today, tithes are normally voluntary and paid in cash or cheques or more ...
s).
Background
In late medieval and early modern government, a "mantal" referred to a
warrior
A warrior is a person specializing in combat or warfare, especially within the context of a tribal or clan-based warrior culture society that recognizes a separate warrior aristocracies, class, or caste.
History
Warriors seem to have be ...
who served a group of farmers. The term evolved to represent a group of farms that supported a mounted warrior, his
horse
The horse (''Equus ferus caballus'') is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of ''Equus ferus''. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million yea ...
and
military equipment. According to Sjöström, the government in those days viewed the country and its revenues as a means of providing armed troops, rather than in terms of a population to be fed. Kiesi states that a mantal was a unit which described how many men were in a household. For example, if a family cultivating a farm had two adult brothers, then the farm was valued at 2 mantals.
Another explanation of the mantal is that of one man cultivating a plot to feed his
nuclear family, but some argue against that idea, citing examples of bunches of farms of about 0.05 mantals which each fed one
household
A household consists of two or more persons who live in the same dwelling. It may be of a single family or another type of person group. The household is the basic unit of analysis in many social, microeconomic and government models, and is i ...
(one nuclear family and perhaps a few more persons). Against this it is argued that the one warrior model was more meaningful from the perspective of the governments of those ages.
According to Kiesi, a farm of one mantal was considered large.