The servants, i.e. the farmhand

[ahad1020]

The servants, i.e. the farmhand, the fisherman, the caretaker of the workhorses, the bakers, the weavers and various maids, such as the housemaid, the malt lady, the cattle maid, the sheep maid and the pig maid, ate at their own table. Their meals consisted of oat and barley flour, peas and beans, pork ham, lard, blood sausages, spit, lard and hare, turnips, dried perch and roach. The hierarchy of raw materials also applied to the production of beer and bread, as the lords' and lords' beers were made with more malt and hops and the bread served at the lords' table was baked from the best sifted flour, while the servants had to be content with beer flavoured with less malt and bread made from unsifted flour. The servants' table was used to feed 14–23 people each week, and there were also about a dozen stable boys who looked after the soldiers' horses. When you add those who ate at the steward's table, the manor fed as many as 50–60 diners daily.

The manor also employed craftsmen and professionals, such as a blacksmith and a headmistress, and in addition, peasants from the surrounding area did seasonal work at the manor. These included clearing brushwood, harvesting hay, overseas data sowing and ploughing, cutting and threshing grain, spreading manure, ditching, clearing meadows and making fence posts, boats, shacks and troughs. The peasants did these chores as day labor and were not counted in the manor's food supply.

The development of Partala, like other royal manors, was left unfinished when King Gustav Vasa died. History books have often repeated the statement that the significance of the manors as model farms for agriculture remained minor. This is no wonder, because a few years in the conditions of the 16th century was not a long enough time to implement major reforms in agriculture. The manor system should not be evaluated only from the perspective of agriculture, because it was only one part of the manors' operations. As Anna-Mari Vilkuna states (Vilkuna 2003, p. 268.), the manor system secured both the operational capacity of the army and developed administration and more efficient utilization of economic resources. Partala was also part of a dense network of manors and administrative centers, where the efficient distribution of food, commodities, and infrastructure produced in different parts of the kingdom compensated for deficiencies on the one hand and balanced the surplus on the other, so that there were at least theoretical possibilities for each manor to comply with the king's orders and provide for the army.