Norsk

Timeline · The heirs fight over the estate

The drottsete and the Germans

1442

In the spring of 1442 the German merchants in Oslo and Tønsberg send a bitter complaint to the council of Lübeck. They may no longer stay in the towns over the winter, prices are being set for them, and they must be out of the country before the middle of September. Behind this stand the townspeople and the drottsete (steward of the realm) Sigurd Jonsson, lord of Giske and the most powerful man in Norway. He is said to have declared that the merchant must leave Norway, «scholde he dar ok water vmme drinken alle syne leuedaghe», even if he had to drink water all the days of his life.1

The complaint from Oslo and Tønsberg

The merchants reminded the councillors of the privileges that Norwegian kings and Queen Margaret had granted and sealed for them. Now they were forbidden to stay over the winter or keep their own households. They were to come no earlier than Holy Cross Day after Easter, 3 May, and be out of the country by Holy Cross Day before Michaelmas, 14 September, or lose their goods. They could sell only to the townspeople, never directly to the farmers.

The townspeople also set the prices. A barrel of ale was to cost 12 Lübeck shillings, and the list of goods shows what the German ships brought up the Oslofjord: ale in half lasts, flour in lasts, hops in shippound sacks, grey and fine cloth, raisins and figs in baskets, almonds, pepper and rice by the lispound, and saffron. The king's bailiff bought a third of everything the merchant brought, they write, and paid less than half of what the goods cost in the market. The townspeople had also appointed 24 men who had sworn to seize any merchant who traded under the privileges of the Hanseatic towns.2

When the merchants' alderman protested, the young Norwegian nobleman who led the case together with Sigurd cursed both him and the Hanseatic towns. He stamped his foot on the ground and said he cared as little for the towns as for the sand that fell out from under the soles of his shoes, «dat sant, dat ome vnder den schosolen vtvelle».3 Then comes the sentence about the drottsete: Sigurd would work «myd aller syner maght myd alle den synen», with all his might and all his men, to get the merchant out of Norway.

The merchants were short of time. King Christopher had written to the townspeople of Oslo that they were to meet him at Whitsun in Lödöse and bring their privileges, and he would gladly seal them and make them better than before. The merchants therefore asked the towns to get a messenger or a letter to the king before Whitsun, so that he would not confirm the townspeople's privileges before he had heard those of the Hanseatic towns.

The drottsete from Visborg

Sigurd had come to power three years earlier. On 3 September 1439 King Eric of Pomerania sat in the castle of Visborg on Gotland. Danish and Swedish magnates had renounced him that same year, while the Norwegian Council of the Realm and the common people still held to him, and they had written to ask for a drottsete, a ruler who could govern the country while the king was away. They proposed three men, and on the advice of the Norwegian councillors who were with him on Gotland, the king chose Sigurd Jonsson.

The drottsete was to take the accounts of the king's bailiffs, send the king his revenues and govern according to law and justice, and if the king died, he was to serve the king's cousin, the Duke of Pomerania, in the same way. Sigurd was then around 50 and had held Giske since the inheritance dispute of 1425. The office had been in the family before, for his great-grandfather Erling Vidkunsson of Giske and Bjarkøy had been drottsete from 1323 to 1331 or 1332, about a hundred years earlier.4

Eastern Norway was unsettled. Amund Sigurdsson had led a peasant uprising in 1436, and two years later came another in Vestfold. In December 1439 one of the participants bought forgiveness from the drottsete in Oslo with the farm Kauserud in Kise in Romerike, 20 mark, three pounds of malt before Candlemas and three the year after, and five head of cattle in the autumn. He promised to be humble and willing in service and «aldri mer i mine levedager være med i noe urettmessig oppløp» (never again in all my days take part in any unlawful rising).

The drottsete travelled a great deal. In March 1440 he was at Bottna church in Viken when the lawman of Tønsberg settled a case in which an estate steward had failed to pay the land rent for twelve years, and the case ended with one good ox. In January 1441 Sigurd handed over Båhus, the castle on the Göta älv, to a squire who gave a castle oath to hold it for King Eric and the realm of Norway and return it when the king or Sigurd demanded it.5

The grain that did not come

A year after his appointment Sigurd received a letter from Munkeliv Abbey in Bergen, which the Bridgettines of Vadstena had taken over in the 1420s. «I år kom det nemlig ikke sigling til Bergen slik det pleide før» (this year no ships came to Bergen as they used to), wrote the abbess and the convent, and the abbey had no income in grain to live on.6

The nuns and brothers sent a messenger to the diocese of Oslo to buy or beg grain, and they asked the drottsete to help him. In return they promised to include Sigurd in the prayers they said every day. On the outside of the letter it said in Latin that it was to be delivered to «den edle, mektige og navngjetne mann herr Sigurd Jonsson, den berømte drottsete i Norges rike» (the noble, mighty and renowned lord Sigurd Jonsson, the famous drottsete of the realm of Norway).

Bergen lived on the stockfish from the north, while grain came by sea, much of it with the German merchants, and without grain there was no malt for ale either. Eastern Norway, where Sigurd had estates and power, was the part of the realm where grain was grown. The letter from Munkeliv and the complaint from Oslo and Tønsberg can be laid side by side: the one asks for grain, the other lists ale, flour and hops.

The election in Lödöse

The union was to be gathered again under a new king. Eric of Pomerania's nephew Christopher of Bavaria had been elected in Denmark and Sweden, and in February 1441 the drottsete sent the Council of the Realm to Lödöse, the trading town on the Göta älv close to the border, to meet the king's envoys. The envoys had only a letter of credence, which showed that they spoke on the king's behalf, and no mandate to negotiate. The council replied that it would come to Kalmar with full authority, because two journeys in a short time would be too costly and cumbersome.

In the spring of 1442 the election of the king was to be settled at a new meeting in Lödöse, and the council wanted the consent of the rural districts. The farmers of the southern district of Gudbrandsdalen gathered at the thing place of Voleseter on 9 April and wrote to the drottsete that they had «liten kunnskap om det» (little knowledge of) what could be done at a change of king. They left the matter to the council, on condition that they could enjoy «de lover og rettarbøter som våre hellige forfedre har unt oss» (the laws and amendments that our holy forefathers granted us).

That same year Christopher was accepted as king in Norway, and a Swedish letter of July shows what a change of king could cost. Three parishes in Selebo hundred near Gripsholm, which Sigurd and his father-in-law had held through rights of pledge, were transferred by the king's order to the cathedral of Strängnäs.7

Philippa and Gripsholm

Around 1435 Sigurd had married Philippa of Eberstein, daughter of a Pomeranian count in King Eric's service, and through her his estates reached into Sweden. Her father had held the fief of Gripsholm in Södermanland in pledge for 24,000 Swedish mark, and when the inheritance was to be divided, Sigurd stood on one side and the count's widow on the other.

In Copenhagen on 10 July 1447 eight knights settled the case as arbitrators. Sigurd and Philippa received 9,489 mark, and the widow and her children kept the rest. The money moved across the kingdoms, and as early as 1436 his sister Katarina had paid 100 Arnhem guilders that Sigurd had borrowed in Stockholm.8

Akershus and the Hansa

At home Sigurd lost Akershus. The Holstein nobleman Hartvig Krummedike took over the castle in 1445, and in November that year the two met in Oslo to settle the accounts. Krummedike claimed payment for flour, a shooting boat and the revenues Sigurd had taken after the handover, and because the castle was less well stocked with food than when Sigurd took it over.

Sigurd was to give five barrels of salmon, five cows, five pounds of malt and flour and a dun foal. Then «tok de hverandre i hånden, kysset hverandre på munnen og lovte hverandre vennskap og kjærlighet» (they took each other by the hand, kissed each other on the mouth and promised each other friendship and love).9

That same year the Council of the Realm forced Sigurd to confirm the Hanseatic privileges, and in 1447 he had to do so again. The man who wanted the merchants out of Norway put his own seal to their rights.

The regent

King Christopher died in January 1448, and while there was no king Sigurd governed as regent. In June the chancellor, on behalf of Sigurd and the council, granted the right to remain in the land to a farmer from Tinn who on the second day of Christmas had stabbed a man in the stomach after a quarrel over a receipt for a pledged strip of land. He had himself been struck on the head with a horn, and he declared the killing the same day.10

Sigurd was himself named as a candidate for the throne, and he supported Christian of Oldenburg against the Swedish king Karl Knutsson. In the summer of 1449 he was there when the council parted from King Christian, and at Korshavn, an outer harbour at the mouth of the Oslofjord, he saw Krummedike's men stop Archbishop Aslak Bolt's servants and take letters from them. The archbishop sided with Karl and threatened revenge on «holsteineren» (the Holsteiner), and it nearly came to a fight between the ships before two of the councillors made peace.11

Once Christian had become king, Sigurd governed as commander over the realm of Norway while the king was away, with his seat at Tønsberghus. In October 1450 he judged in the town hall of Tønsberg in an inheritance dispute between two farmers from Agder, and in December 1452 he sold nine øresbol of crown land in Sandsvær on behalf of the crown. He probably died the following year.

After the drottsete

In November 1454 King Christian granted Solør as a fief to the young courtier Alv Knutsson, «slik herr Sigurd Jonsson hadde det tidligere» (as lord Sigurd Jonsson held it before). Alv was the grandson of Sigurd's sister Katarina and would later receive the Giske estate.12

The following year the German merchants in Bergen killed the commander Olav Nilsson, who wanted to forbid them to stay in the town over the winter, and they also killed the bishop in Munkeliv Abbey, where fifteen years earlier the nuns and brothers had asked the drottsete for grain.

Sigurd's son Hans Sigurdsson pledged Giske in 1464, and Philippa ran the estate for many years. The words about the water lived on in a later tradition that Sigurd wanted to drive the Germans out of Norway, and the letter of complaint from Oslo and Tønsberg is the contemporary basis for it.13

Notes

  1. The complaint is printed in Hanserecesse II,2 no. 590 and in Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch 8 no. 712. It is undated. Hanserecesse assigns it to the Hanseatic diet in Stralsund in May 1442, and Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch dates it to 1440 to 1447, but the king's summons to Lödöse at Whitsun points to the spring of 1442. The words about the water are reported by the opposing side.
  2. The fine for such a merchant was «VIII witte vnde XIII mark», probably the old Norwegian fine of 13 mark and 8 ørtuger, which appears in the ordinances of 1330 and 1331. As early as 1331 King Magnus Eriksson, with Erling Vidkunsson in the Council of the Realm, had forbidden unmarried foreigners to live in Bergen over the winter. The merchants in Bergen sent their own complaint, which is printed in a later volume of Hanserecesse.
  3. The nobleman was junker Erlend, son of herr Endrid. An Erlend Endridsson was among the three whom the council proposed as drottsete in 1439, and he may be the same man.
  4. The appointment is DN 16/106, cf. SDHK 23266. The other two candidates were Olav Håkonsson and Erlend Endridsson, and the councillors with the king were Mats Jepsson, Kolbjørn Gerst and the lawmen Simon Bjørnsson of Oslo and Niels Aslaksson of Hedmarken. Sigurd was the son of Agnes Sigurdsdatter and Jon Marteinsson and grandson of Sigurd Havtoresson and Ingebjørg Erlingsdatter. The year of birth, around 1390, is an estimate.
  5. The letter of atonement is DN 9/276, the settlement in Viken DN 21/383 and the castle oath DN 2/743. The man who bought his pardon was Gudmund Helgesson of Holt, and the rising of 1438 was led by Halvard Gråtopp. The squire at Båhus was Kolbjørn Gerst. A castle oath was meant to prevent a feudal lord from taking a castle for himself in troubled times.
  6. DN 16/119. The letter survives only as a copy in a manuscript from Vadstena, and the date, probably 21 September 1440, has been supplied by the editors. German merchants had held privileges for importing grain since 1277. That the words about the water may have played on ale is an inference.
  7. The meeting of 1441 is known from DN 5/707, preserved in a letter book, and the envoys were Nisse Eriksson and Albrekt Bydelsbak. The letter from Voleseter is DN 5/711, and the farmers chose one of their own to carry the answer to Lödöse. The letter about the parishes is SDHK 24353, where Sigurd is called Sigurd Johansson. The parishes were Över-Selö, Ytter-Selö and Toresund, and the estate had belonged to the heirs of the drottsete Bo Jonsson Grip, after whom Gripsholm is named.
  8. The arbitration is DN 2/774, and the receipt of 1436 DN 2/725. The widow was called Helena, and the letter does not say whether she was Philippa's mother or stepmother. Arnhem guilders were gold coins struck in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Katarina Jonsdatter was the widow of Alv Haraldsson (Bolt).
  9. DN 2/766. The settlement was made in Nordre Hjelpergården in Oslo. The kiss on the mouth was a common gesture of reconciliation among the nobility in the Middle Ages.
  10. The testimony is DN 21/446, taken in Skien by Sigurd's own bailiff, and the chancellor's letter is DN 1/806. The chancellor was Gunnar Holk, provost of St Mary's Church in Oslo. Declaring the killing set it apart from murder, which was concealed and could not be atoned for with fines.
  11. DN 3/808, written in Oslo on 6 September 1449. According to the letter the seizure happened without Krummedike's knowledge, because he had not yet come home from Denmark. The councillors who mediated were Kolbjørn Gest and Simon Bjørnsson. Both Christian and Karl invoked Olaf the Holy in their letters of election.
  12. The judgment in Tønsberg is DN 21/463, the sale in Sandsvær DN 5/779 and the letter of enfeoffment to Alv Knutsson DN 2/808, issued at Varberg at the request of Åke Axelsson. Sigurd died some time between December 1452 and November 1454. In 1450 the Treaty of Bergen bound Norway to Denmark under one king.
  13. The tradition is given in Store norske leksikon. The bishop killed in 1455 was called Torleiv. Philippa died in 1477 or 1478.

People: Sigurd Jonsson, Philippa av Eberstein, Erik av Pommern, Christopher of Bavaria, Christian 1., Karl Knutsson Bonde, Hartvig Krummedike, Aslak Bolt, Amund Sigurdsson, Katarina Jonsdatter, Erling Vidkunsson, Agnes Sigurdsdatter, Jon Marteinsson, Sigurd Havtoresson, Ingebjørg Erlingsdatter, Alv Haraldsson (Bolt), Margaret (Margrete Valdemarsdatter), Magnus Eriksson, Olav Nilsson, Hans Sigurdsson (junker Hans), Alv Knutsson, Åke Axelsson (Tott)

Sources

HR II,2 nr. 590 (LUB 8 nr. 712); DN 16/106; SDHK 23266; DN 9/276; DN 21/383; DN 2/743; DN 16/119; DN 5/707; DN 5/711; SDHK 24353; DN 2/774; DN 2/725; DN 2/766; DN 21/446; DN 1/806; DN 3/808; DN 21/463; DN 5/779; DN 2/808; DN 1/802; DN 8/302; SNL/NBL, Sigurd Jonsson; SNL, hansaforbundet.