Lignings

Lignings is a historical term used in Danish and Norwegian administrative contexts to refer to the official process and the resulting records by which authorities determined tax liability. It describes how a state or local government assessed individuals or households for taxation, typically based on available information about property, income, occupation, and other circumstances.

The process involved local officials collecting data through inspections of dwellings, landholdings, livestock, and economic activity. The collected information was compiled into a ligning, often preserved as a ligningsliste, and later formalized in ligningsprotokoller or tax rolls. These records established the basis for tax collection and, in some periods, were linked to other obligations such as military service or poor relief.

Lignings records are important primary sources for historians and genealogists. They shed light on social structure, wealth distribution, household composition, land tenure, and community organization. The documents also illustrate periods of reform in tax policy and the administrative practices surrounding revenue collection in Denmark and Norway.

The use of lignings declined with the modernization of tax systems, the introduction of centralized income and property taxes, and the development of contemporary cadastral and administrative registries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, lignings survives mainly as a historical term found in archival materials and scholarly works, rather than as an active mechanism of taxation.