Timeline · The estate is broken up

Bergen merchants divide the estate by inheritance

1661 to 1726

In 1661 merchants in Bergen own Giske. The Smit brothers have bought the Sunnmøre estate from Gabriel Marselis, and one of them, the alderman Henning Hanssen Smit, had earlier leased the same estate for the king as bailiff in Romsdal, the king's official for tax and justice, after the viceroy Hannibal Sehested lost it in 1651.

Bergen was still the largest town in the country, and the Smit family belonged to the merchants and officials who profited from the king's debts. The brother Hans Hanssen Smit, born in 1610, owned according to Store norske leksikon «en del av Giskegodset» (a part of the Giske estate). In 1676 he was ennobled with the name Lillienskiold. The year before they bought, in 1660, Frederick III had introduced absolutism. The king now ruled alone, and the nobility's old privilege to fiefs and offices was gone.

The estate did not stay together in the family. Through inheritance and sale it was divided between Hans's son Jonas Lillienskiold, who was county governor (amtmann), the king's highest official in the county, in Romsdal from 1681 until his death in 1691, Henning Smit's widow Margrethe and Provost Christopher Pedersen Hjermann in Borgund, the parish around today's Ålesund. The provost lived close enough to see the farms he bought.

At the same time more farmers came to own the land they worked. In western Norway and Sunnmøre the farmers' share of the land they farmed themselves rose from 12.5 per cent in 1661 to 22.4 per cent in 1721, according to the historian Ståle Dyrvik.

Around 1720 Christen Sæd had gathered most of the estate again, and in 1726 he was listed as the owner of Giske. That year a service was held in the marble church on Giske for the last time in thirty years, writes the priest Hans Strøm in «Søndmørs beskrivelse». The old main building between the church and what was called «Gidske-Closter» was pulled down, and when Strøm wrote in the 1760s, only the cellars remained.

Sources

Peder Fylling (1859, s. 81; 1883, s. 45 til 46); SNL, Lillienskiold (slekt etter Hans Schmidt); Wikipedia, liste over amtmenn i Møre og Romsdal; Hans Strøm, Søndmørs beskrivelse (1766), s. 110 til 112; Jens Kraft (1831), s. 124; Dyrvik 1977, etter Mykland, Norges historie bd. 7; rapporten «Giskegodset etter 1582».