by Desconhecido
Late-medieval Sweden in the shadow of the crisis – an archaeological overview
Urban settlement
The extensive urban expansion of the High Middle Ages in Scandinavia came to an end in the beginning of the fourteenth century and during the remainder of this century very few towns were founded in the Scandinavian countries. Only in Sweden, including Finland, were new urban places founded during the latter part of the fourteenth century and in the beginning of the fifteenth.11 Several of these had played a role as central places in their regions before they acquired formal status as towns, for example as market places or places of pilgrimage. In Denmark, urban expansion did not start until in the fifteenth century, while in Norway very few towns were founded in the late Middle Ages.
There are significant differences between the newly founded towns of the late Middle Ages and the places of older origin.12 The former were mainly small units of settlement compared to the latter. They did not possess the developed institutional structure of the older towns, thus lacking buildings like monasteries, hospitals, sanctuaries etc. Usually a single church was the only institution. A famous exception of this pattern was the late-medieval town of Vadstena, the centre of the cult of Saint Bridget, where several institutional buildings were present.
Concerning urban decline at the time of the crisis, there are distinctive traces of desertion of settlement in some towns. In Uppsala a discontinuity of settlement has been observed in two places in the northern outskirts of the medieval town.13 A rapid expansion in the later part of thirteenth century and in the beginning of the fourteenth century was followed by an abandonment of settlement in this area. At the end of the fifteenth century it was resettled by highly specialised craftsmen, indicating a new expansion of settlement during the recovery phase of the crisis.
In the town of Örebro, desertion of settlement took place in the late Middle Ages but unlike Uppsala in a central part of the town.14 Also, in Danish towns there are indications of desertion.15 In the town of Lund, an area in the northern outskirts, where craft buildings were located in the High Middle Ages, was abandoned after the year 1350 and was not resettled until the sixteenth century.16
In the town of Linköping the impact of the crisis was discernable not as desertion but as an almost total stop of construction works during the first decades after 1350.17 This lacuna is clearly discernible in the new dendrochronological material from the towns of Östergötland where the number of dates decreases significantly after the year 1350 (Fig. 20).
A critical remark concerning the dendrochronological dates from towns is necessary. A lot of them originate from a smaller number of large-scale excavations in medieval and post-medieval towns like Söderköping in Östergötland and Jönköping and Kalmar in Småland. Excavations in the former town have generated a large amount of dates from the thirteenth century and in the latter two towns from the seventeenth century. This means that these periods will be overrepresented in the material when using it for studies of long-term development.
Totally deserted towns seem to have been less common in the late Middle Ages. Probably some urban places in medieval Denmark were wiped out, like Herrested on the island of Funen.18 In medieval Sweden two places may most likely be considered as examples of urban desertion. One of them is the place Folklandstingstad in Lunda parish of the province of Uppland. The place was obviously an urban structure in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but lacking a formal status as a town.19 According to some written evidence Folklandstingstad was located in the neighbourhood of a local thing stead at the church of Lunda. Finds of cultural layers of the High Middle Ages has given further support to this localisation. Folklandstingstad was counteracted by the Swedish kingship, deciding in 1350 that the inhabitants had to move away to the nearby town of Sigtuna. In 1385 the place seems to have been totally abandoned.
A since long accepted explanation is that solely the acting of the king caused the disappearance of Folklandstingstad. However, the fact that there is a chronological coincidence between this disappearance and the outbreaks of the bubonic plague in the 1350s and 1360s makes it reasonable to suppose that the latter highly contributed to the rapid desertion of this urban society.
Our second example of urban desertion is a place called Gamla Köpstad at the west coast of Sweden, located around 5 km south of the town of Varberg. This place is less well understood than Folklandstingstad and our knowledge of it is solely based on the results of some minor excavations of the last decades.20 Remains of houses, cultural layers, ceramics and coins indicate some sort of coastal trading place with a principal dating to the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Probably Gamla Köpstad was finally abandoned in the fifteenth century. However, a thorough discussion on the connections between the abandonment and the societal crisis must be postponed at the moment, waiting for further and hopefully more substantial results concerning the function and chronology of the place.
Urban changes, indicating a reaction to the crisis, can already be seen in some towns in the later part of the fourteenth century. In Uppsala the character of the town settlement west of the river Fyrisån seems to have changed significantly at the middle of the fourteenth century. An older, agglomerated settlement of wooden houses was replaced by a residential settlement of stone houses surrounded by open garden areas.21 An ecclesiastical district was materialised around the cathedral. Contrasting to this was the profane settlement east of the river – the area of merchants and craftsmen – their yards filling the blocks with a coherent settlement of wooden houses. Extensive finds of bronze casting in a central part of the east riverside, indicating a specialised, large scale workshop established at the end of the fourteenth century, may be seen as an example of this new social structure of the town.22 Furthermore, another expression of this process was the establishment of a new square in the 1380s.23
A decisive change seems to have happened also in the episcopal town of Linköping in the late Middle Ages. In the 1380s, only a few decades after the outbreak of the plague in 1350, new signs of expansion and restructuring became visible in the settlement. A densification and a regulation of the town plots took place and the first stone houses were built. This new expansion is absent in the dendrochronological material, a fact that may be explained by bad preservation conditions of wood in the cultural layers of the late Middle Ages.
These changes of settlement reflect, according to Tagesson, the establishment of the residential town and the building of clerical estates.24 Thus, a differentiation of the town settlement similar to the one observed in Uppsala seems to have taken place in Linköping in the late Middle Ages.
In the episcopal town of Turku (Åbo) in the southwest of Finland a period of expansion began already in the 1360s and no signs at all of decline or stagnation are discernable.25
the town grew in every direction with new buildings and the expansion of the street network. At this phase, the population of the town has increased remarkably and new technologies and innovations were also presented.26
So, the archaeological experience of Turku surprisingly well supports the earlier picture, obtained in Uppsala and Linköping, of the last decades of the fourteenth century as an expansive and dynamic, urban period.
Explaining this urban dynamics in the initial, severe phase of the crisis may seem rather difficult. However, there was a significant increase of gifts and donations to the clerical institutions in connection to the outbreaks of the plague in the later part of the fourteenth century, meaning a concentration of resources to the dioceses.27 This phenomenon may probably be looked upon as a possible clue to the dynamics of the mentioned episcopal towns.
However, concerning late-medieval development, one episcopal town differs a lot from the above-mentioned places that is the town of Skara in the west of Sweden. After an expansive period in the thirteenth century and in the beginning of the fourteenth century Skara was struck by decline and desertion after the middle of the fourteenth century.28 The dynamics, observed
in Uppsala, Linköping and Turku in the late Middle Ages, seems to be lacking in Skara. On the contrary, this place together with other towns in the west were characterised by a sort of “de-urbanisation” in the fourteenth century when some administrative functions were moved from the towns to the royal castles in the countryside.29
The decrease of thickness in the formation of cultural layers in the later part of the fourteenth century has been a highly debated topic since the 1980s, the phenomenon being observed in urban contexts all over Scandinavia.30 Several explanations have been presented but a connection between the change of the formation of layers and societal crisis has not been explicitly discussed.
Because of the general decrease in population the towns had to care for their own supply of foodstuff to a much higher degree than before, meaning an extension and a more rational use of their own surrounding cropland. Thus, the urban refuse was used as manure in the fields outside the towns, enforcing a new management of the garbage inside the towns.31
Town churches
In some cases the on-going construction of urban churches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially the cathedrals, can be looked upon as a sort of condensed reflection of societal crisis. As mentioned above, all construction works ceased in the settlement of Linköping after the year 1350 and so did the works at the cathedral in the town. Not until in the first decades of the fifteenth century they were resumed.32
In the cathedral of Uppsala no stop of the construction works can be observed during the latter part of the fourteenth century. However, the walls of the southern parts of the nave, which were erected during this period, show a more deficient craftsmanship than earlier walls.33 In the building works of the fifteenth century a higher quality of masonry is visible anew. These qualitative differences have been explained by a lack of qualified masons, caused by the general decrease of the population at the end of the fourteenth century.34
The cathedral of Turku shows no signs of decline in the time of the crisis but rather expansion. Extensive construction works were carried out on this building in the second half of the fourteenth century.35 A new chancel was built together with several chapels. Furthermore the sacristy was enlarged. Thus, these changes of the cathedral harmonise well with the above-described expansion of the town settlement of Turku.
An interesting comparison has been made between the cathedral of Trondheim in Norway and the cathedral of Odense in Denmark.36 At the former the construction of a new nave started in the thirteenth century, the work staying unfinished when the plague hit Norway in the middle of the fourteenth century. Thereafter the building had to wait for its completion until the nineteenth century.
In Odense the building of a new cathedral began around 1300 but the work was still going on at the time of the Black Death. During the later part of the fourteenth century, there was a stop of building activities, being resumed not until the beginning of the fifteenth century. At the end of the century the cathedral was finally completed.
While the Danish church reminds us a lot of the development of the cathedral of Linköping, its counterpart in Trondheim reflects something much more severe. Not only did lack of economic resources prevent the completion of the cathedral but there was also a total extinction of the knowledge of working in stone caused by a dramatic decrease of population. This was not seen in any other parts of Scandinavia, thus reflecting a much greater impact of the crisis in Norway.37
Rural settlement
Large-scale archaeological investigations of agrarian settlement in connection with the late-medieval crisis have been few in number, so far, and are mainly from the southern part of the country. Usually dealing with desertion of single farmsteads or villages, this phenomenon has been studied not as a primary topic but just as a phase among others of the history of the farmstead or the village. However, several deserted medieval farmsteads have been archaeologically investigated in different parts of Sweden. Often the investigations have been carried out in woodland areas where abandoned settlement is well preserved.
The impact of the late-medieval crisis in different regions has been a matter of debate in recent years. According to an earlier opinion the agrarian central areas of medieval Sweden withstood the effects of the crisis better than the marginal woodland of the north, mostly because of more favourable conditions for agriculture in the former areas.38 This idea has been criticised by a group of archaeologists working with settlement in the woodland regions.39 Their opinion is that such areas could cope better with decline than the central regions thanks to a multifaceted economy with several additional activities besides crop cultivation. Thus a natural flexibility should have been inherent in this kind of peasant economy, which made a rapid shift of production possible in times of agricultural decline.
A typical example of a woodland farmstead is a place called Högahylte in the southern part of the province of Småland, which was excavated in 2007.40 The settlement was established in the thirteenth century and included buildings, crop land and places for ironworking. The economy of the farmstead was a mixed one, characteristic of a woodland area, with ironworking as an important, additional activity besides farming. The farmstead was built in a typical colonisation area but was abandoned in less than 200 years at the end of the fourteenth century. Thereafter its farmland was used for cultivation by neighbouring farmsteads. It has been assumed that the late-medieval crisis was the utmost reason for the abandonment but why this particular farmstead was abandoned is more obscure. An extremely marginal location in relation to other farmsteads in the region has been discussed as a reasonable explanation for abandonment.41
Deserted medieval settlement has been investigated at several places in the province of Jämtland in northern Sweden.42 Because the farmland of deserted medieval farmsteads often were used as hay meadows or for summer pasture by nearby villages the locations of many abandoned medieval farmsteads have long been known.
A place called Eisåsen reminds of the above described in Småland. Here a farmstead was established in the thirteenth century and abandoned before 1450. Thereafter, its farmland was used for summer pasture up to the nineteenth century. However, quite a different narrative, compared to the one of the farmstead in Småland, has been presented for Eisåsen. The abandonment of this farmstead is not comprehended as the end of a phase of colonisation, but as a part of a cyclical course of events where expansion alternated with stagnation.43 The flexibility of the agrarian society of Jämtland enabled an adaptation to the new economic realities of the late Middle Ages. Desertion was not a sign of a societal catastrophe, rather a part of dynamic change.
In other parts of Sweden where the geographical and cultural conditions were different, for example the fertile plains of Scania, a partial desertion has been observed, meaning an abandonment of only one or a few farmsteads of a village or a hamlet but not the disappearance of the entire settlement. In some places only parts of a single farmstead may have been abandoned. This type of desertion is no doubt difficult to discern in a written source material and most likely also problematic to identify archaeologically without large-scale excavations including a multitude of farmsteads.44 However, in the province of Scania there are some good examples of partial desertion.
In the village of Kyrkheddinge outside the town of Lund a single farmstead was followed archaeologically from the end of the tenth century up to modern times. Desertion is evident during the second half of the fifteenth century when a major dwelling of three room units and a connecting barn were reduced to a minor building of only two room units.45
In the western part of Örja village, investigated in 2010, some kilometres east of the town of Landskrona the development of settlement could be followed from the phase of establishment in the eleventh century up to modern times.46 The excavation area included four different farmsteads, known from the oldest maps of the village originating from the seventeenth century. A reduction of the farmsteads took place after 1400 when only two of them were in use.
The examples of medieval settlement, discussed above, represent scattered evidence of desertion from different parts of Sweden. It is of course not possible to draw some conclusions of the relative extent of desertion on the basis of these examples. Investigations showing more obvious trends of desertion usually require interdisciplinary methods.47
One of the most noticed of such investigations is the one by Thomas Bartholin, already presented in the introductory chapter, including dendrochronological dating of still standing log houses from the middle and north of Sweden.48 With a dramatic clarity Bartholin’s results expose a rapid impact of the crisis around 1350 and a continuous absence of building activities up to the 1450s when a new expansion seems to have started. During this period of nearly one hundred years no houses were built, which probably means that the need for new buildings then was covered by an abundance of abandoned houses available because of the demographic decline (Fig. 21a).
The new compilations of dendrochronological dates, from the provinces of Småland and Östergötland in southern Sweden, confirm in general Bartholin’s results concerning a rapid impact of the crisis on the building of houses around 1350 (Fig. 21b). However, there are no total absences of dates from the later part of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth century in the southern provinces. Furthermore they do not show any clear expansion in the second half of the fifteenth century. Such an expansion is not discernible until in the seventeenth century and then only in the province of Småland.