How power was shared in the realm

Chieftains become the king's men

c. 980 to 1050

Around the year 1000 there was no state in Norway as we imagine one. Power lay with the chieftains on the great farms along the coast and in the fjords. A chieftain had land, ships, kinsmen and men who followed him, and he was listened to at the thing, the assembly where the free farmers met to settle disputes and make law. Most farmers still owned the land they farmed.

Olaf Haraldsson wanted to unite the country under one king and one faith. He needed men of old family around the districts. Such men became lendmenn. A lendmann governed a district for the king, called out the leidang (naval levy) and attended the thing. In return he received veitsler, the right to the revenues of the king's estates in the area. Snorri calls Arne Arnmodsson of Giske a lendmann and a friend of King Olaf.

The arrangement rested on loyalty, and loyalty could be bought. Cnut the Great sent silver to the great men along the coast. At Stiklestad in 1030 Kalv Arnesson stood in the peasant army against the king, while his brothers stood on the king's side. The following year Olaf was declared a saint in Nidaros. The king who fell would have more power dead than alive.

People: Arne Arnmodsson, Kalv Arnesson, Finn Arnesson, Torberg Arnesson

The king's in-laws

c. 1035 to 1150

Royal power grew through marriage. Harald Hardrada was king from 1046, and Tora Torbergsdatter of Giske had two sons with him, Magnus and Olaf. Snorri calls her queen, Store norske leksikon holds that she was probably a concubine (frille). The sources disagree. What is certain is that the kings after Harald had their mothers from Giske.

Being the king's kinsmen gave power, but also danger. According to Ågrip, Harald and Finn Arnesson quarrelled over the veitsler, the revenues Finn had received from the king. Harald wanted them back, and Finn went to Denmark. The veitsler were both livelihood and honour. The king gave them, and the king could take them back.

From the 1070s the church took fixed form, with bishops in Nidaros, Bergen and Oslo. Churches were built by kings and great men, and many were private churches on the manor farms. By most estimates the marble church on Giske was raised in the 12th century as the family's own chapel. Whoever built the church also owned it.

People: Tora Torbergsdatter, Harald Hardråde, Magnus 2. Haraldsson, Olav Kyrre, Finn Arnesson, Skofte Ågmundsson

Olaf becomes the eternal king of the realm

1152 to 1240

In 1152 or 1153 Nidaros, today's Trondheim, got its own archbishopric. Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Orkney, Shetland and the Isle of Man became one church province, with the archbishop at Olaf's grave as its supreme leader. From now on the realm had two lords, the king and the archbishop.

Archbishop Øystein Erlendsson, who was himself related to the Giske family, crowned the young Magnus Erlingsson in Bergen in 1163 or 1164. It was the first coronation of a king in the Nordic countries. At the same time came the first written law of succession, which gave the bishops a leading role when a new king was to be chosen. In a letter of privilege Magnus gave the realm to God and Olaf the Holy and promised to rule as the saint king's vassal. In Latin texts from the same time Olaf is called rex perpetuus Norvegiae, the eternal king of Norway.

The idea was simple and strong. Whoever sat on the throne ruled on behalf of a saint. The church gave the king sanctity and protection against pretenders, and the king gave the church freedom and land. Even so, the civil wars went on for almost a hundred years. The lendmenn of Giske, among them Nikolas Kuvung, stood in the middle of them. Around 1220 a Pål of Giske was listed first among the witnesses when the king gave the archbishop the right to his own coinage.

Olaf's law became a concept that lived for 400 years. Olaf had issued church laws at the Moster thing in 1024, but what they contained is disputed. The legend collection Passio Olavi from the 12th century writes that his laws were meant to stop the powerful from oppressing ordinary people, and that he bound the king's power with strict laws. When Magnus the Lawmender issued the national law code in 1274, it was that law that in practice lay behind it when people later said «Sankt Olavs lov» (St Olaf's law). The historians Magne Njåstad, Erik Opsahl and Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde have shown that the law made Olaf the foundation of the realm: the king swore to keep Olaf's laws as they had been amended in agreement with «dem som bygger landet» (those who dwell in the land), that is, the thing. The farmers themselves seldom wrote «Sankt Olavs lov». They referred to the law of Norway and the law book and greeted with «Gud og Sankt Olav» (God and St Olaf). It was the great men who took up Olaf's law in times of crisis.

People: Øystein Erlendsson, Nikolas Pålsson Kuvung, Pål Flida, Inge Bårdsson, Skule Bårdsson

The lendmenn become the king's barons

1240 to 1350

After the civil wars Norway became a hereditary kingdom. The law of succession of 1260 said that the realm should pass from father to eldest legitimate son. Magnus the Lawmender's national law code of 1274 gave the whole country one law. The lendmenn were called barons and received the title herr. They were now the king's men in the government of the realm more than chieftains in their districts.

The king and the church fought over the boundaries between them. When Eirik Magnusson became king at the age of twelve in 1280, his guardians ruled for him, and one of them was Bjarne Erlingsson of Giske and Bjarkøy. The guardians took back rights the church had been given in Tønsberg in 1277, and the archbishop excommunicated Bjarne. In 1323 the Council of the Realm made Erling Vidkunsson drottsete, regent for the seven-year-old King Magnus Eriksson. The Council of the Realm consisted of the foremost clerical and secular great men, who governed together with the king or in his place.

Behind the dispute lay the land. Older estimates reckon that around 1350 the church owned about 40 per cent of the land measured in land rent, the king about 7 per cent and the secular aristocracy about 20. Perhaps only a third of the farms were owned by farmers. More recent research gives the church 20 to 40 per cent and secular landowners more, so the figures are disputed. The land rent was the annual rent the tenant farmer paid, and on the Giske estate it was paid in stockfish.

People: Bjarne Erlingsson, Margrete Nikolasdatter, Erling Vidkunsson, Vidkunn Erlingsson

The realm gets kings who live elsewhere

1349 to 1450

The Black Death came to Bergen in 1349. The plagues that followed emptied farms all over the country, and by the beginning of the 16th century the land rent was roughly a quarter of its level before the plague, according to Store norske leksikon. The landowners lost income. The royal line died out on the male side, and Norway got kings who lived elsewhere.

In 1397 Eric of Pomerania was crowned in Kalmar in southern Sweden as king of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Queen Margaret held the real power until she died in 1412. The union document that was to bind the kingdoms together survives as a paper document with few seals, and whether it was a valid agreement or a draft is disputed.

When the king was far away, the Council of the Realm became more important. Sigurd Jonsson, who won Giske in the inheritance dispute of the 1420s, became drottsete in 1439 and regent after the death of Christopher of Bavaria in 1448. He was considered as a candidate for king, but supported Christian of Oldenburg. In 1450 the Treaty of Bergen bound Norway to Denmark under one king. Sigurd is regarded as the largest landowner in Norway of his time.

The money went through Bergen. Around 1360 the German Kontor (Hanseatic office) was organised at Bryggen, and the merchants from Lübeck and the other Hanseatic towns controlled the exchange of grain from the Baltic for stockfish from the north. The nordfarere, fisher farmers and landowners with their own jekts (cargo boats), came south with the fish in summer. The land rent from the tenant farmers on the Giske estate ended up in the same place, and in 1563 the bailiff sold 493 våg of fish from the estate in Bergen. The king's men tried to tighten their grip. In 1455 Hanseatic merchants killed the commander of Bergenhus, Olav Nilsson, and Bishop Torleiv in Munkeliv monastery on Nordnes.

When the union fell into crisis at the end of the 1430s, St Olaf became a political symbol. King Eric of Pomerania was deposed in Denmark and Sweden in 1439, while the Norwegians held on to him and put pressure on him. In September 1439 he appointed Sigurd Jonsson of Sørum, the owner of Giske, as drottsete with full royal powers. The letters of the Council of the Realm from this time ended with «Gud og Sankt Olav» (God and St Olaf). In Sweden the same happened with St Erik, who entered the seal of the realm in 1439. When Christian I and Karl Knutsson Bonde fought over the Norwegian throne in 1449, both sides used Olaf in their election letters, and Karl's supporters wrote of «Sankt Olavs lov og vår hellige lovbok» (St Olaf's law and our holy law book).

People: Erling Vidkunsson, Ingebjørg Erlingsdatter, Sigurd Havtoresson, Sigurd Jonsson, Hans Sigurdsson (junker Hans)

Knut Alvsson turns against the union king

1450 to 1502

Gaute Ivarsson became archbishop in Nidaros in 1475 and held the see for 35 years. He had five fiefs in Trøndelag and ran his estate with land registers and careful accounts. Mona Ringvej's book on Erik Valkendorf calls him the richest man in the country and says that the archbishopric owned about half of all the land north of the Dovre mountains. The figure is not confirmed in the scholarly sources. Archbishop Aslak Bolt's land register from the 1430s lists around 2,600 land units, farms and parts of farms, and about 1,560 of them lay in Trøndelag.

In the winter of 1483 the Norwegian and Danish Councils of the Realm met King Hans in Halmstad in Halland, on the west coast of present-day Sweden. Gaute led the Norwegian envoys. The agreement they obtained, the Halmstad Recess, set out the conditions Hans had to accept to be elected. A recess was a written resolution after a meeting. The Council of the Realm gained control of the fortresses except Båhus, the castle on the Göta älv, and the fiefs were to be given to native-born men. A fief (len) was an area the king entrusted to a feudal lord, who collected taxes and fines and kept order in return for paying the king his share. That same summer Gaute crowned Hans in Nidaros Cathedral.

The promises held poorly. Henrik Krummedike, of a noble family from Holstein and probably born in Norway, inherited about 240 farms and parts of farms in Norway in 1476 and gathered 178 more, mostly in Båhuslen. He became councillor of the realm and commander of Båhus in 1489. The bailiffs who collected for the feudal lords were hated in many places. In 1496 farmers in Sunnmøre killed the councillor of the realm and feudal lord Arald Kane. Six years earlier he had received a third of the inheritance of Junker Hans Sigurdsson on behalf of his wife. Mona Ringvej's book on Erik Valkendorf tells that it happened at the thing in Borgund.

In 1497 King Hans's mercenary army defeated Sten Sture's peasant army at Rotebro north of Stockholm, and the union was united again. After the royal court of justice in Konghelle on the Göta älv in 1498, Krummedike was richly rewarded with fiefs, according to Mona Ringvej's book on Erik Valkendorf. A retterting was the king's own court, where he judged together with councillors of the realm and lawmen. Knut Alvsson of Giske, commander of Akershus, received nothing according to the book. In the summer of 1499 he lost his fief.

Knut had family and estates in Sweden. He pledged land to Archbishop Gaute and went east, and in August 1501 he joined Sten Sture, Svante Nilsson and Bishop Hemming Gadh when the Swedish great men renounced their allegiance to King Hans. He demanded that the Danish bailiffs be removed from Norway and took Akershus and Tønsberghus. On 18 August 1502 he came on board Krummedike's ship near Oslo under safe conduct and was killed. A court in Oslo declared him an outlaw after his death, and the estate passed to the Crown.

People: Alv Knutsson, Hans Sigurdsson (junker Hans), Knut Alvsson

The duke's hereditary kingdom

1502 to 1513

From 1506 the king's son, Duke Christian, governed Norway as viceroy, with Erik Valkendorf as chancellor. In March 1507 he summoned selected men to the council chamber in Oslo and got them, one by one, to accept him as full lord of the realm, with punishment for anyone who did not obey his letters. Mona Ringvej's book on Erik Valkendorf calls it a coup without violence. The right the recess had given the council to rebuke the king had been set aside. The same year the duke asked Gaute to crown him king of Norway. The archbishop refused as long as King Hans lived.

Knut's estate was managed by the king's bailiffs, and the book tells that the bailiff in Hedmarken demanded extra taxes without consent. In the winter of 1507 to 1508 the common people there rose under Herlaug Hudfat. The duke crushed the rebellion and believed that Bishop Karl of Hamar had supported it. The bishop was imprisoned and died in captivity in 1512. Gaute wrote to the king that a bishop should be judged by the church itself, and asked him to spare the common people new burdens. The duke could not touch the archbishop. In Sweden, Svante Nilsson, who in 1504 had married Knut's widow Mette Dyre, spread rumours that the duke was breaking the law Olaf the Holy had given the Norwegians.

In 1508 the duke got lawmen and clergy to declare him the rightful heir to the kingdom of Norway. According to the book he relied on an old declaration by the Council of the Realm about his father, which he and Valkendorf had found in the archive at Akershus. In Denmark and Sweden the king was elected. Norway was now to be inherited.

Was the resistance national pride? The historian Ian Grohse has shown that the complaints of the 15th and 16th centuries concerned particular bailiffs and particular breaches of the law. The farmers in Gudbrandsdalen complained in 1497 about bailiffs who were foreign and understood little of the laws. What they asked for was a bailiff who kept them by law and justice. In practice foreign meant loyal to the union king, native meant loyal to the law of the realm.

Gaute died in the spring of 1510, around 70 years old. King Hans wrote to the pope that the archbishopric had been a hotbed of treason, and that the archbishop was the foremost in the council of the realm, «regni Noruegie consilio maior». He wanted a loyal man there. Pope Julius II needed money and support from the kings of Europe, and he gave King Hans what he asked for, against the cathedral chapter's own choice. Valkendorf became archbishop of Nidaros. The book interprets the choice as an attempt to break the power of the archbishopric from within.

In the summer of 1510 Valkendorf travelled to Rome to fetch the pallium, the white band that showed that the pope approved him. The thousand-year-old St Peter's had been torn down to be built anew, and Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The money came among other things from letters of indulgence, which were sold throughout Christendom, also in the North. Seven years later the indulgence trade became the starting shot for the Reformation, which in the end took from the archbishopric both its land and its power.

In early summer 1511 Valkendorf came to Nidaros. He had been sent to tame the archbishopric, but met a place that had its own power. The choir of the cathedral was octagonal, built on the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and on the high altar stood St Olaf's shrine, around two metres long and gilded. The pilgrims were allowed right up to the saint, and the water from the holy spring in the choir was sold in small jars. The canons of the cathedral chapter came from good families, owned farms and jekts and traded. Ringvej writes that much of the land counted as the archbishop's north of the Dovre mountains really belonged to them. The choir was badly damaged after a fire in 1432. Valkendorf had it restored stone by stone instead of pulling it down. Ringvej asks whether the encounter with Olaf turned something in him. One of the altars in the church was dedicated to the three patron saints of the union, the Swede Erik, the Dane Cnut and the Norwegian Olaf. It had been given by Ingjerd Erlendsdatter, the widow of Arald Kane, who had been killed in Sunnmøre in 1496. She and her sister Sigrid were among the heirs of Junker Hans of Giske. With the altar came land in Nordmøre and Trøndelag, so that the priests would sing masses for the dead for all time. The inheritance of Junker Hans also included estates in Nordmøre, and it is possible that some of the land came from there.

North of the Dovre mountains there were two lords who could measure up to each other. On one side of the Trondheimsfjord sat the archbishop. On the other, at Austrått on Fosen, sat the councillor of the realm Nils Henriksson, married to Fru Inger, the daughter of Otte Matsson. Otte had received Sørøya in Finnmark and the lower farm on Bjarkøy in the division of Junker Hans of Giske's inheritance in 1490, and Nils was commander of Vardøhus, the fortress in the far north-east of the country. The inheritance from Giske had thus made Austrått a power in the north. In the summer of 1512 Valkendorf himself sailed to Vardøhus, the first archbishop there in several hundred years, according to Ringvej's account. He wrote a short description of Finnmark in Latin, in which he called the stockfish so valuable that it was carried to almost all Christian peoples. The stockfish from the north was the basis of the wealth of the archbishopric and the canons, and of the Giske estate.

In the summer of 1515 King Christian II was to marry Isabella of Habsburg, the granddaughter of Emperor Maximilian. She was 14 years old. When the bride did not come, Valkendorf was sent to Brussels together with Nils Henriksson of Austrått and Henrik Krummedike to fetch her. The court was not pleased with the king's relationship with Dyveke. On the voyage home the ship ran into a storm, and the queen fell seriously ill. In the stave church at Grip off Kristiansund hangs an altarpiece which, according to tradition, was given by a queen in distress at sea. It was made in a Netherlandish workshop early in the 16th century, and four altarpieces from the same time and place stand in churches along the coast: Røst, Hadsel, Leka and Ørsta in Sunnmøre. Ringvej thinks Valkendorf ordered them together, on behalf of the queen who had made a vow in the storm. That is her interpretation, and no source confirms it.

Six years after the journey to Rome, Valkendorf exchanged land with Karl Knutsson, son of Knut Alvsson. Karl received farms near Giske, the archbishop received farms in Trøndelag.

People: Knut Alvsson, Karl Knutsson

The Crown takes the church's estates

1513 to 1582

Christian II became king in 1513 and around 1515 gave Karl Knutsson, Knut Alvsson's son, the family estate back. Valkendorf soon came into conflict with the king over the rights of the church, was driven out of the country in 1521 and died in Rome the following year. He also had an enemy at court, Sigbrit Willems, mother of the king's concubine Dyveke. According to the Danish historian Hans Svaning it was Valkendorf who found mother and daughter in Bergen in 1507, but Svaning relied on rumours, and scholars are sceptical.

Valkendorf answered with printing. In 1519 a missal for the churches appeared, Missale Nidrosiense, which according to its title was to be used in the whole kingdom of Norway, «totius regni Noruegie». The breviary was printed in Paris, far from the king in Copenhagen. On the title page Olaf sits on the throne with a dragon under his feet, and the dragon wears a royal crown. The work was led by the young dean Olav Engelbrektsson. Ringvej writes that the sources point to his being the son of Engelbrekt, the man who killed Knut Alvsson's bailiff Lasse Skjold in 1497, but this is not certain. In Bergen and Oslo the king's commanders now sat, Jørgen Hanssøn and Hans Mule, who took land from the church, demanded taxes without consent and stopped the canons' trade in stockfish and grain. Lars Hamre thinks Hanssøn used the judgment against the farmers who killed Lasse Skjold as a model when he had a messenger from the farmers of Ryfylke executed.

In November 1520 Christian was crowned king of Sweden in Storkyrkan in Stockholm. The Swedish regent Sten Sture the Younger had fallen earlier the same year. He was the son of Svante Nilsson, the man who had married Knut Alvsson's widow. All the opponents had been promised amnesty, but on the third day of the celebrations Archbishop Gustav Trolle brought a charge of heresy, and the castle gates were locked. More than 80 people were beheaded on Stortorget: bishops, noblemen, burghers and craftsmen. Among them was Erik Knutsson, the brother of Karl Knutsson of Giske. Karl himself was killed the same year. The Norwegian councillor of the realm Knut Knutsson Båt was beheaded shortly after. In the spring of 1521 Valkendorf left Nidaros and travelled to the pope in Rome.

The journey became a flight. The ship was driven by a storm into Amsterdam, where the king himself was, and Valkendorf escaped because the townspeople refused to arrest a priest. He crossed the Alps in the middle of winter and reached Rome during the carnival in February 1522. The new pope, Adrian VI, was the same Adrian he had negotiated with in Brussels. The pope did not arrive in the city until late summer, and by then the plague was raging. Valkendorf died that autumn without having met him, and no one knows where he was buried. In Rome he had told the German humanist Jacob Ziegler about the journey to Finnmark, and his description ended up in the Vatican Library. There the Swede Olaus Magnus found it, and it became one of the sources for the Carta marina of 1539, the map with sea serpents and the Moskenes maelstrom that adorns this website. At home the dean Olav Engelbrektsson was elected archbishop. He was to be the last.

The last archbishop, Olav Engelbrektsson, was elected in 1523 and led the Council of the Realm. He tried to protect both the old church and Norway's own government. The meeting of lords at Bud in 1533, where the Giske inheritance was decided, was one of the last council meetings. On 30 October 1536 Christian III's coronation charter stated that Norway was to be placed under the Danish Crown. The archbishop fled on 1 April 1537, and the Council of the Realm was gone.

The Reformation moved land. The bishops' estates went to the Crown, and the monastery estates were in time put to secular uses. The feudal lords were now the king's officials, often Danish noblemen who could be moved and dismissed. In 1661 only about 20 per cent of the landed property was owned by farmers. In 1582 Gjørvel Fadersdatter conveyed Giske and the estate north of the mountains to the king. The estate the family had gathered through marriage, inheritance and purchase over some 600 years was now Crown land.

Mona Ringvej sums up the four decades from King Hans to the Reformation as a struggle for power. To gather estates, fiefs and kingdoms under one family was the goal of a king in that age. In Norway the church and the independence of the realm had grown together through Olaf, who was saint, lawgiver and eternal king of the realm all at once. If the realm was to be placed under Denmark, Olaf had to be removed too. In 1536 and 1537 the books in Nidaros were burned and more than 30 altars in the cathedral taken down. The king's coronation charter laid down that Norway should no longer be a kingdom of its own. Ringvej holds that religion was the weapon and power the goal. In 1582, 45 years later, Gjørvel Fadersdatter handed the Giske estate over to Frederick II, his son.

People: Karl Knutsson, Karine Alvsdatter, Gjørvel Fadersdatter (Sparre)