Timeline · In the government of the realm

Bjarne Erlingsson excommunicated

1285

Around 1285 Pope Honorius IV in Perugia in Italy sends a letter on to King Eirik Magnusson in Norway, king 1280 to 1299. The letter was written in the name of his predecessor, Pope Martin IV, and it complains about the guardians who governed for the young king. Two of them have been excommunicated by the archbishop in Nidaros, present-day Trondheim, and one of them is called «Biarna af Gizka».

The dispute was fought out in Bergen. The town was the largest in the realm, with the royal residence and the cathedral on Holmen, where Bergenhus fortress stands today, and along Vågen lay the wharves where stockfish from the north was exchanged for grain and cloth. There sat the king's council, and there sat Bjarne Erlingsson of Giske, around 35 years old, as one of the guardians of the young king. Eirik was twelve when his father Magnus the Lawmender died in 1280, and the papal letter reminds him that he was crowned «in your thirteenth year of life» while the guardians stood beside him and swore that the rights of the church would be upheld.

In 1277 King Magnus the Lawmender and Archbishop Jon Raude had concluded a settlement in Tønsberg, called the concordat of Tønsberg (sættargjerden). There the church had its rights written down: the church was to choose its own bishops and judge in matters of faith and church affairs, and the archbishop was allowed to keep the right to strike coin. When Magnus died in 1280, the guardians governed the realm for the twelve-year-old Eirik. They believed the king had given the church too much, and wanted to take power back to the king. That is why they withdrew many of the rights the church had been given in Tønsberg. Behind the dispute lay land and revenues. Older calculations reckon that around 1350 the church owned about 40 per cent of the land in the country measured in land rent, the king about 7 per cent and the secular aristocracy about 20. More recent research gives the church 20 to 40 per cent and the secular landowners more, so the figures are disputed. According to the papal letter, they introduced laws and customs that violated the freedom of the church, and when the archbishop held a church council and had the church's prohibitions against such things read out, the guardians appealed to the pope. According to the historian Knut Helle, it was Bjarne who had the archbishop's right to mint revoked. Around 1220 Pål of Giske, of the old family on the farm, had stood as a witness when the archbishop had his right to mint confirmed.

The archbishop answered with excommunication. Excommunication meant that Bjarne was shut out from the fellowship of the church and the sacraments, and other Christians were not to associate with him. The papal letter complains that the other guardians nevertheless associated with the excommunicated men and honoured them «far more than before». The other excommunicated man, Andres Plytt, died under the ban, and the guardians had him buried in the king's own chapel in Bergen. The councillors seized and bound clergy and drove them into exile from their property. Archbishop Jon and two bishops had to leave the country, and the archbishop died in exile in 1282.

The papal letter builds on what Bishops Andres of Oslo and Torfinn of Hamar presented at the Curia, the papal court, and it gives the church's version. The guardians' view is given only through the opposing side: that the archbishop and the bishops introduced «great novelties and improprieties in the land». The dating to 12 April 1285 is the editor's and is uncertain.

The dispute was also about fish. In November 1290 the new archbishop, Jørund, summoned «Herr Bjarne of Giske» to appear in Nidaros within three months. The deadline was St Peter's Chair, 22 February 1291. Bjarne did not come. On Friday 9 March Jørund took testimony under oath in his council chamber, with the bishops of Hólar and Skálholt in Iceland present, so that the evidence would exist for posterity. Five men were questioned separately. The canon Sigvat related that he had been at Vågan in Lofoten in the summer when Bjarne held a meeting at Brudarberg. There Bjarne forbade the reading of Vågaboka, the church's rules for the tithes and duties in Hålogaland, the northern part of the country, and said that the king «did not want more law books in the land than one». Magnus the Lawmender's Code of the Realm (Landsloven) of 1274 had given the whole country one law. The canon Erlend heard him abolish the boat tithe, the cow-rent tithe and the cheese tithe, «which he called new», and said that the church had lost these tithes «for surely about five winters». Sira Audun relates that Bjarne wanted only the old Christian law from the days of Archbishop Sigurd and King Håkon to apply, and that the king's lawman, the judge learned in the law, should judge church cases as in other cases under the Code of the Realm.

Vågan, Vágar, by present-day Kabelvåg, was the first trading place in the north and the great market for stockfish. Almost two hundred years before, King Øystein Magnusson and his brothers had required every man who fished there to give the king five fish, and the sagas have Øystein build a church at Vågan. Heimskringla also has him build fishing huts there, which Store norske leksikon does not mention. The skrei (spawning cod) went into Vestfjorden, the sea between Lofoten and the mainland, from February to April. The fishermen were farmers who rowed out in open boats and took the cod with hand lines, one line per man. The longline came to Lofoten several hundred years later. The fish was hung on wooden drying racks and dried in wind and cold for about three months. In summer the winter's catch hung on the racks or lay ready for shipping south, and a meeting at Vågan in summer probably brought together fishermen, merchants and jekt crews (the crews of coastal cargo boats). Vågaboka is known up to 1282. Giske lay far away, but Bjarkøy, an island north of Harstad in Troms, lay close, and the Bjarkøy family had long had its interests in the fishing villages. The tithes of boats, cows, cheese and skrei were large revenues that church, king and magnates competed for. What stayed with the farmers and the king was not sent to Nidaros.

At the same time the realm was in a trade war. In 1284 the Wendish Hanseatic towns, the German trading towns on the Baltic, led by Lübeck, closed off trade with Norway, and the grain from the Baltic failed to arrive. Grain, flour and malt were the main imports, and stockfish was the most important thing the country had to pay with. The German merchants had received privileges for grain imports in 1277. On the outer coast, where the fields were small and the soil thin, grain was the scarcest commodity. Bjarne was among those who negotiated, and peace was concluded at Kalmar in Sweden in 1285. In Europe King Edward I of England had just conquered Wales, and in 1291, the same spring the witnesses were questioned in Nidaros, Acre, on the coast of present-day Israel, the last city the crusaders held in the Holy Land, fell.

According to Helle, Bjarne may later have been reconciled with Jørund. In 1297 he mediated between the archbishop and the cathedral chapter in Nidaros. In September 1303 he sat first among four royal ombudsmenn (commissioners) in Nidaros and sentenced fifteen guarantors in Verdal in Trøndelag to pay 40 marks and 12 øre for four lasts of grain that Aslak at Lyng had taken from the tithe of the korsbrødrene (Brethren of the Cross). Payment could be made «in silver, grain or livestock», for coin was little used in the countryside. Twelve years after the testimony in Nidaros, he gave judgement in favour of the church's tithe.

People: Bjarne Erlingsson

Sources

DN 3/1; DN 17/880; DN 3/30; DN 3/56; Norsk biografisk leksikon (Helle); Store norske leksikon (Øystein 1. Magnusson, norsk fiskerihistorie, lofotfisket); prosjektnotatene «Giskebrevene 1», «Fiskeværene og Giskegodset», «Fiske og fiskeredskap», «Jordbruk i Norge 800 til 1650» og «Havner, seilaser og mat langs kysten, kontrollert»; prosjektsiden «Makten i riket».