Glossary

Night-men's people

Danish: natmandsfolk

Jutland called them natmandsfolk, the night-men's people, or just kæltringer. The historian Folmer Dyrlund defined them in 1872 as a hereditary travelling people who saw themselves as apart from the rest of the nation and were seen that way too. He dates their heyday to about 1805–1845, which happens to be Sidsel's adult life.

They were really two peoples who pretended not to know each other. The night-men proper emptied privies, flayed dead horses, swept chimneys and killed stray dogs and cats. The others called themselves tradesmen, professionister, or simply the travellers, de rejsende: glaziers, tinsmiths and kettle-menders who would not be counted with the night-men. A district judge wrote in 1835 that they were all one kin all the same, and they married each other and slept in each other's huts.

Nobody knew how many there were. Officials guessed anything from 300 to a thousand, and settled on 800. When the government counted them in 1819, the returns came to about 300 people in some sixty families, and those were only the ones who could be caught standing still.

The state never quite knew what to do with them. A bishop complained to the king in 1813, a county governor called them a nomadic colony in 1819, the government counted them the same year, and in 1835 the governor of Viborg county had his whole county searched for them in a single day, the raid remembered as the great hunt. Her life tells how each of these touched Sidsel. After about 1845 the travelling life faded away.

Sources: Folmer Dyrlund, Tatere og natmandsfolk i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1872)

Night-soil man

Danish: natmand

The natmand took his name from the night. He cleaned the nathuse, the privies, after dark and hauled the waste away in the night cart. A diocesan governor wrote in 1796 that hardly a townsman could be found to do it.

The towns kept an appointed night-man with a free house just outside the gates: in Viborg outside St. Ib's gate, in Aalborg outside Østerport, in Aarhus close outside the town, by Mølleporten. By 1819 only four towns still had a night-man's family: Mariager, Thisted, Fredericia and Aarhus. In Aarhus the post was Sidsel's from 1815 to 1826, and she was the only woman ever to hold it.

An ordinance of 31 January 1794 declared that the work no longer made a man dishonourable. The townspeople were slower to agree, and the stain clung to the night-man's family for generations.

In the country the night-man was also the rakker, the knacker, who skinned dead horses. His hut was a rakkerkule, a knacker's hole, and it was the travelling families' favourite place to spend the night.

Sources: Folmer Dyrlund, Tatere og natmandsfolk i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1872); Inge Rasmussen: Sidsel Rolandsdatter; "Århushistorie", Skalk 1980:4

Travelling glazier

Danish: glarmester

Before window glass came in big panes, farmhouse and church windows were made of small pieces of glass held in strips of lead. When they broke, someone had to come and fix them, and in Jutland that someone was usually a travelling glazier, one of the glarmesterfolk. In some districts they had the trade all to themselves.

Everything a glazier owned went into his glass box. In December 1819 a judge searched two of them. One held a small glazier's hammer, a knife, an awl, a strip of brass and a stump of English tin. The other held a knife, an awl, a hammer, pincers, a file, a pair of compasses, a soldering bolt and a few scraps of glass. Apart from the clothes they stood in, their owners had nothing else.

The glaziers were the snobs of the road. They called themselves tradesmen and would not be counted among the night-men, though they married into their families and slept in their huts. Sidsel's father, her half-brother Christian Peter, Ane Marie's father Peder Olesen and her second husband Laus were all glaziers.

Sources: Folmer Dyrlund, Tatere og natmandsfolk i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1872)

Cunning woman

Danish: klog kone

Every district had its cunning folk, men and women who could cure a sick cow, find out who had bewitched a child, or tell what was buried under the stable floor. Many of them came from the travelling people, and the farmers paid them partly out of fear of what they might do if refused.

The courts called it kvaksalveri, quackery, and fraud, and sent the cunning folk to the tugthus for it. How Sidsel worked, and what it cost the farmers who believed her, is told on The cunning woman.

Sources: Folmer Dyrlund, Tatere og natmandsfolk i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1872); Inge Rasmussen: Sidsel Rolandsdatter; "Kvinden, der bedrev mystiske kunster. Om Sidsel Rolandsdatter"

Tugthus

Danish: tugthus

A tugthus, literally a house of discipline, was a prison where the inmates were made to work, much of it spinning wool. Viborg's was built from 1740 to serve Jutland, and Odense's opened in 1752 for Funen. They were meant for 'fresh and strong' beggars, vagrants, idle youths and unruly servants, but in time they filled up with thieves as well.

In 1822 they became officially 'houses of discipline and correction', and the lesser offenders were supposed to be kept apart from the hardened ones. Dyrlund notes drily that the separation was more in name than in practice.

The Viborg prison was something of a family home. Sidsel's mother was born there, her father served a year there for theft, Sidsel served three terms there, and her son Peter Christian was confirmed in its chapel.

Sources: Folmer Dyrlund, Tatere og natmandsfolk i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1872); Viborg Tugthus, prisoner register 1807–08; Viborg Tugthus congregation, confirmations, 28 February 1830, boys no. 2; Inge Rasmussen: Sidsel Rolandsdatter

Landsoverret

Danish: landsoverret

In 1805 Denmark's old regional courts, the landsting, were replaced by two higher courts, the landsoverretter. The one for North Jutland sat in Viborg and heard appeals from the town and district courts. Above it stood only the Supreme Court in Copenhagen, which heard Sidsel's case in 1838.

The Viborg court was replaced in 1919 by today's Vestre Landsret, which still sits in Viborg.

Sources: Paul G. Ørberg, "Fra landsting til landsoverret. Retsreformen i 1805", Fortid og Nutid 1997; "Vestre Landsret", Wikipedia

Rigsdaler and rigsbankdaler

Danish: rigsdaler, rigsbankdaler, skilling

Until 1813 Danes counted in rigsdaler, each worth 6 marks or 96 skilling. The Napoleonic Wars wrecked the currency, and in January 1813 the state went bankrupt. A new rigsbankdaler, also of 96 skilling, was exchanged for six rigsdaler in old banknotes. In 1854, the year Sidsel died, it went back to being called the rigsdaler.

That is why the sums on this site are sometimes in rigsdaler and sometimes in rigsbankdaler: it depends on the year and on who wrote them down.

Sources: "Danish rigsdaler", Wikipedia

Poor relief

Danish: fattigvæsen

Ordinances of 1708 forbade begging and made the public responsible for the poor. Regulations of 1803, one for the towns and one for the country, put each parish in charge of its own poor and sorted them into three classes by need, and they remained the basis of poor relief for most of the 1800s.

The question was always which parish a pauper belonged to, and therefore which parish had to pay. For Sidsel's two daughters in Sæby the answer was Nors, where their mother had been born, and Nors paid the foster parents for years. At the end of their lives Sidsel and Laus lived in the Storring poorhouse, and Laus was buried as a glazier living on poor relief.

Sources: "Fattigvæsen", Den Store Danske (lex.dk); Projekt Nors: Sidsel Rolandsdatters døtre Anne Marie og Johanne Cathrine; Storring parish register (kontraministerialbog), 1838–1853

Vagrant

Danish: løsgænger

The law sorted the poor into the deserving, who stayed put and got relief, and the wandering, who were to be caught and put to work. A løsgænger, a 'loose-goer', was a person with no master, no home and no trade the law recognised.

Sidsel was six when she was first held as one, with her mother and sisters at Holstebro in 1792. Almost fifty years later her daughter Birthe Cathrine was sentenced for vagrancy after travelling with her.

Sources: "Fattigvæsen", Den Store Danske (lex.dk); Folmer Dyrlund, Tatere og natmandsfolk i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1872); Judgment of Hjerm-Ginding herred court, Holstebro, 14 December 1792; Vest-Sjællandske Avis, 22 January 1841, p. 3