Officers
Officers were provided with a large farm or a small manor house directly from the Crown, not from a rote. They did not, however, receive a salary from the state, but were instead paid by the rotar around the province, as part of the rote members' tax payments, and by farmers who worked the land belonging to the officer's farm. The officers' homes were loans, rather than outright gifts, and their size and quality was proportionate to the occupants' military rank. It was this system that was originally called the "allotment system". A condition for the system to work was the reductions carried through by the state, expropriating land and farms from the nobles, which were then provided to the officers. The officers' homesteads would be located in the same part of the province as the soldiers whom the officer would command in battle, often close to the rote. The officer thus knew the men he would lead, contrary to the practice in many other countries where the army officers would live on estates that were separated from the soldiers by both distance and lifestyle.
Read more about this topic: Swedish Allotment System
Famous quotes containing the word officers:
“In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don’t know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.”
—Anthony Henley (d. 1745)
“I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme—mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank of supposition, deduction and gossip.”
—Bernard Ingham (b. 1932)