1703 Icelandic census

Procedure of the census

The census recorded the name, age, residence, and social standing of every inhabitant; it was the first such complete census. Those without fixed address were recorded under the place where they spent the night before Easter.

The census was assembled and organized by two Icelanders, Árni Magnússon, who had just been appointed a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and Páll Vídalín, sheriff and vice-lawman. They were commissioned in 1702 by King Frederick IV of Denmark to perform a complete survey of Iceland, then a Danish possession, in order to inventory its economic resources and propose improvements; this included the census as well as the Jarðabók or land register. The royal commission, dated 22 May 1702, listed the census in its Paragraph 8 and also required a count of livestock.

In October 1702, Árni and Páll wrote to the sheriffs of all the districts in Iceland with specifics of how the census survey was to be conducted. The instructions are more detailed than in the royal commission, showing that they had developed the idea. Árni's draft of this letter made in the spring states the census task as:

to assemble a true accounting of all families in that country, from the best to the lowest person, in which shall be specified and explained the husband's and the wife's name, their children, and relatives' names who at their home, also all servantmen, servant youths servantwomen and girls, in summa no one omitted great and small, young and old, who are to be found in the whole country, wherewith the large number of poor at each location must be precisely observed and described.

The district sheriffs delegated the task to the overseers of each poor-law district or commune (hreppr), of whom there were 3–5 in each of the 163 communes, and they therefore performed the count. This diverged from the instructions of the king, who had stated that the parish priests were to perform the census, but Árni and Páll presumably thought it would be more efficient to use the secular administration and to present the task to the magistrates in the Althing, and the magistrates then decided to pass it to the communes, the next level of government.

The count was made between December 1702 and June 1703, in most places in March and April. Icelanders were aware of the uniqueness of the census, and referred to the winter of 1702/03 as "census winter". The census record for each district has been preserved, although in some cases the original document has been lost.

The census report was presented in the Althing in June 1703 and then sent by Árni and Páll to Copenhagen, where it was largely ignored until 1777, when the king's representative, Skúli Magnússon, decided to use it to derive a land survey. The documents were loaned to Iceland in 1921 to be prepared for publication, and in 1927 under the terms of an agreement between Iceland and Denmark became the property of Iceland. They are preserved at the Icelandic National Archives. The livestock survey is also preserved, but is incomplete, although Skúli Magnússon's description of Iceland includes figures for each district. The livestock register has not been published.