It is well known that at the dawn of the capitalist era, in less developed countries, but closely connected with the young bourgeois world, there was a return to forms of exploitation that humanity had long passed over, and especially cruel ones. Such are plantation slavery in the New World and the so-called second enslavement of peasants in a number of countries in Eastern and Central Europe. At first and in more developed countries, capitalism generated "bloody legislation against the expropriated" and created "white slaves" in the form of indentured servants and exiles .1 In our view, the two qualitatively heterogeneous phenomena - labor legislation and the second enslavement of the peasants in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries - are connected, one with the West, the other with the East of Europe. Meanwhile, at the turn of the Middle Ages and modern times, there were countries in Europe where capitalist exploitation had not yet triumphed and the second enslavement had not yet been implemented, but where, undoubtedly, there were tendencies to both. The clash of these trends can be observed even within the same farm or estate. In other words, the strengthening of feudal-corvee exploitation took place here in the context of the successful formation of the bourgeois system, and therefore in the future the process of decomposition of feudalism was particularly peculiar. This was the case in 17th-century Sweden, where the noble economy was not yet the subject of research by either Russian pre-revolutionary or Soviet historians .2 Specific historical material relating to the agricultural history of Sweden in the late Middle Ages is of indisputable theoretical interest. The question of commodity production under feudalism and the nature and causes of the second enslavement of the peasants continues to cause controversy. In our textbooks on the history of the Middle Ages and Modern times, as well as in the new edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, it is said tha ... Read more