Timeline · The estate is broken up

The estate is divided between two creditors

1657

On 14 August 1657 the financier Gabriel Marselis receives the deed to Giske and 113 farms in Sunnmøre. The farms in Romsdal go to the general Reinhold von Hoven. The Giske estate, which had belonged together for several hundred years, is split in two.

Marselis was born in 1609 and was one of the great creditors of the Danish-Norwegian crown. Store norske leksikon states that in 1642 and 1643 he had claims on the crown of 380,000 rixdollars, and that the Marselis brothers received, among other things, «Giskegodset på Sunnmøre» (the Giske estate in Sunnmøre) as settlement for loans. The king paid with land because he had no money.

According to the older descriptions, the estate was first pledged to von Hoven and Marselis, and then divided. Von Hoven bought the farms in Romsdal, and they became the origin of what was later called the Vestnes estate, after the village of Vestnes on the south side of the Romsdalsfjord, directly across the fjord from Molde. Marselis received the main farm on Giske and the farms in Sunnmøre. The sources disagree about the year of the pledge: the topographer Jens Kraft (1831) gives 1651, while the priest Hans Strøm (1766) and the historian Peder Fylling give 1657. They also disagree about the number of farms. Strøm gives 113, while Fylling gives 143 or 153 in his two editions.

The pattern was the same throughout western Norway. The historian Erling Reksten found that officials took over 71 per cent of the crown land sold in the diocese of Bergen around 1660, while the burghers bought only 2 per cent. Crown land was handed over as settlement for loans to the king.

The same summer Denmark went to war against Sweden. At the Peace of Roskilde in February 1658 the king had to give up Scania. It was there that Gjørvel Fadersdatter, the last of the family to own the Giske estate, had received Børringe Abbey in exchange for the Giske estate in 1582. Both sides of the exchange were now out of the king's hands.

Sources

SNL, Gabriel Marselis; Hans Strøm, Søndmørs beskrivelse (1766), s. 109; Jens Kraft, Topographisk-statistisk Beskrivelse (1831), s. 122 til 123; Peder Fylling (1859 og 1883); Øystein Rian, «Embetskjøpmennene i Danmark og Norge på 1600-tallet» (2022), etter Reksten; Lokalhistoriewiki, Giskegodset; rapporten «Giskegodset etter 1582».