Timeline · The family become lendmenn

The oldest letter about Giske

c. 1220

The letter has neither date nor place. It begins with King Håkon Håkonsson's greeting to Archbishop Guttorm in Nidaros and ends with twelve names. The first is «Pall i Gizka», Pål of Giske.

The letter concerns Nidaros, present-day Trondheim. The town lay on a peninsula where the river Nidelva curves out into the Trondheimsfjord, with the royal residence, the archbishop's residence and Christ Church, which was under construction over the grave of Olaf the Holy (St Olaf), the king who fell at Stiklestad in 1030 and was regarded as a saint. Pilgrims came from all over the Nordic lands. The sea route in passed Agdenes at the mouth of the fjord, where King Øystein Magnusson, king 1103 to 1123, had had a harbour laid out early in the 1100s. Snorri Sturluson counts harbour building among Øystein's works, and archaeological finds in the 1990s confirmed that the harbour dates from his time. Where the letter was written, we do not know. It is known from a copy or a printed edition, and the editors have dated it to around 1220.

The king gives the archbishop and his successors the right to have a moneyer of their own. Translated from the Old Norse text, they are to have «a silver striker, a man who knows the work well, and servants with him», either together with the king's own moneyers or in the archbishop's residence. The silver is to be struck «with such purity and thickness as we decide». The king gives his reason like this: the coinage he wants to circulate in the land «stands better with unity and good order when such friends of God join us in counsel». At the same time he takes the archiepiscopal see and everything it owns, «smaller and greater, near and far», under his protection. The church got the income and the honour of minting. The king kept the right to decide what the coin was to be worth.

There was much to decide. From the time of King Harald Hardrada, the middle of the 1000s, people reckoned in marks, øre, ertog and penning: one mark was eight øre, 24 ertog or 240 penninger. Only the penning was struck. Mark, øre and ertog were units of account. A weighed mark of silver weighed an estimated 200 to 250 grams, while a counted mark was 240 coins. Because the coins were constantly mixed with less silver, the two drifted apart, and around 1340 a counted mark was worth only about one fifth of a mark of silver. That is why people often wrote contracts in forngild mynt, the value of the old pennies. In the countryside most things were paid in goods. Land was measured in månedsmatsbol, land that in rent yielded the value of one month's food. The measure already appears in the land register of Munkeliv Abbey in Bergen from around 1175, and a month's food was reckoned in butter and flour. Before 1350 the land rent, the annual rent the tenant farmer paid to the landowner, may have been about one sixth of the farm's harvest, but that is an estimate. Later sources show that the tenant farmers on the Giske estate paid their land rent in fish, and it was probably so around 1220 too.

The king who issued the letter was young. Håkon Håkonsson was born in 1204 and elected king in 1217, so he was about 16 when the letter was written. The realm was governed by Jarl Skule Bårdsson and the king's councillors, and the civil wars were not over. By then they had lasted around 90 years, since Sigurd the Crusader died in 1130, and Skule's own rebellion in 1240 lay twenty years ahead. Skule himself descended from Giske, through Tora Skoftesdatter, daughter of the chieftain Skofte Ågmundsson on Giske, and the Rein family at Rein in Rissa by the Trondheimsfjord. Archbishop Guttorm had held office since 1215. The archbishopric had been founded in 1152 or 1153 and under Archbishop Øystein Erlendsson, archbishop 1161 to 1188, had grown into one of the greatest powers in the land. Øystein, who was himself related to the Giske people, had crowned Magnus Erlingsson, son of the magnate Erling Skakke, in Bergen in 1163 or 1164. It was the first royal coronation in the Nordic countries, and 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 charter of privileges Magnus gave the realm to God and Olaf the Holy and promised to rule as the saint king's vassal. Latin texts from the same time call Olaf rex perpetuus Norvegiae, the eternal king of Norway. The king on earth ruled on his behalf, and the archbishop guarded his grave. The letter is probably the result of negotiations between the king's men and the church, and it shows how royal power and church shared power after the civil wars. In those same years Snorri was in Norway as a guest of Jarl Skule.

Who Pål of Giske was, the letter does not say. The local history «Borgund og Giske», volume I, traces the family from Pål Skoftesson, son of Skofte Ågmundsson, to Nikolas Kuvung, who was a lendmann, one of the king's foremost men with land and revenues from the king, in the period of the civil wars and died in 1217, and on to his son Pål Flida. If the witness is Pål Flida, he had taken over from his father only a few years earlier. Even so, it is not certain that it is him. He may also be another Pål in the family, and the generations in this period are disputed. After Pål Flida the family overviews place a Peter Pålsson, but he appears in no source. The name is inferred from the fact that the next man on Giske, Nikolas, was called Petersson.

At home on Giske grain was grown at the chieftain's seat, and one cultivation layer east of the church is dated 1200 to 1270. The farm was a mixed farm with grain, cattle and outfield, and the work was done by household members and servants. Slavery had almost disappeared, and the majority of farmers had become tenant farmers, legally free people who rented the land. Water mills came into use in the 1200s, and no source says whether Giske got one. The population of Norway was growing, the land was under pressure, and towards the end of the High Middle Ages there was probably scarcity. Out on the coast it was the fishery that gave a surplus. The fishermen used hand lines from open boats, one line per man, and the spring cod fishery in Borgundfjorden, between Ålesund and the island of Sula, ran, according to later sources, from February to the end of March.

The place in the list of witnesses says something about rank. Pål stands first, ahead of Gregorius Jonsson, Dagfinn, Master Bjarne, Peter Brynjulfsson, Master Aslak, Bård barre and the others. At the very bottom stand Viljalm på Torget, Ivar i Berodal and Gunnar grjonbak. This suggests that Pål was one of the highest-ranking magnates present, probably a lendmann. The letter shows that the family on Giske still belonged to the foremost in the realm, forty years after Snorri's sagas of the kings end in 1177.

As a lendmann, Pål had duties at sea. The leidang (naval levy) was the farmers' duty to provide ships, men and food for the king's fleet. The leidang ships were built and manned by the farmers in the skipreider (ship districts), the districts along the coast, and under the Gulating Law «Mørene», probably Sunnmøre, was to provide 16 ships with 25 sesser, rowing benches. The lendmann and the king's årmann (royal steward) sent out the summoning tokens, called in the crews and held the weapons thing (assembly) in spring. It is probable that a lendmann on Giske commanded a ship or part of the fleet in addition to the ships the family owned itself, and whether the lendmenn on Giske were helmsmen of Sunnmøre leidang ships is not stated in the sources that have been read. Around 1220 the leidang was turning into a tax. From about 1200 the king received part of the provisions every year whether or not the fleet went out, and the leidang tax is regarded as Norway's first state tax. From the sagas it has been inferred that the great royal ships were built in Nidaros until 1233, and that under Håkon Håkonsson the building moved to Bergen. According to the saga, King Sverre's ship Mariasuden had 280 men on board.

Whether Pål travelled to Nidaros to witness, we do not know. From Giske the route ran north past Hustadvika in Romsdal, where ships lay waiting for weather before the open stretch of sea. The distance to Nidaros is an estimated 145 to 160 nautical miles, and with night harbours and waiting the journey took an estimated four to eight days. In a headwind it could take weeks. On board, the crew lived on porridge, flour, dried fish, butter and bread, with water to drink, while ale belonged on the ships of chieftains and kings.

Out in Europe these were unsettled years. In 1215 Magna Carta was issued in England, and in the same year Pope Innocent III gathered the church for the Fourth Lateran Council. Francis of Assisi was still alive, and the mendicant orders were spreading. In the 1220s famine is recorded in northern Europe. Trade followed the stockfish. From Northern Norway it went along the coast past Giske to Bergen, and from there to England, as it had done since the 1100s.

The ships that carried the fish could be large. At Bryggen in Bergen a great ship has been found, built of pine felled in the winter of 1187/88, probably from Sogn. It was an estimated 27 to 30 metres long and could carry at least about 60 lasts, or 120 tonnes. The ship historian Christensen suggests the archbishop, bishops, the king or rich monasteries as possible owners, and that is his own assessment. Bergen was the staple port for stockfish from the north around 1200, and cogs fetched fish there from the end of the 1100s. Back came grain, flour and malt, for Norway exported fish and timber and imported grain. The king took his share at the source. A retterbot, a royal amending ordinance, from Øystein Magnusson and his brothers says that every man who fished at Vågan in Lofoten was to give the king five fish. The church took a tithe of the catch.

The letter is the oldest preserved one concerning Giske. Snorri stops his account in 1177, and the saga of Håkon Håkonsson and the fragments of the saga of Magnus the Lawmender cover the period up to around 1270. After that it is the letters in Diplomatarium Norvegicum that tell the history of Giske. Seventy years after the mint letter, Giske appears again in a letter from Nidaros. In 1291 Archbishop Jørund took sworn testimony against Herr Bjarne Erlingsson of Giske, who had married into Giske and was one of the most powerful men in the realm. Bjarne was under excommunication, shut out from the fellowship of the church, because he had revoked the church's letter of confirmation from King Magnus the Lawmender, king 1263 to 1280, and taken tithes in Hålogaland, the northern part of the country, from the church (DN 3/30). In 1220 a Pål of Giske stood first among the witnesses when the king gave the church a right. In 1291 it was the lord of Giske who took rights from it.

People: Pål Flida

Sources

DN 3/1; DN 3/30; DN 17/880; bygdeboka Borgund og Giske, bind I; SNL, «mark», «Øystein 1. Magnusson», «leidang», «månedsmatsbol» og «Norge i høymiddelalderen»; Gulatingsloven, utgjerdsbolken kap. 22; Christensen 2002, Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 25; NIKU Oppdragsrapport 168/2013; prosjektnotatene «Giskebrevene 1: Bjarne Erlingsson», «Penger og verdier», «Båtbygging, seil og leidang», «Jordbruk i Norge 800 til 1650», «Fiske og fiskeredskap» og slektsoversikten (rettet); rapporten «Havner, seilaser og mat» (kontrollert); prosjektsidene «Makten i riket» og «Slektsbånd».