My excavations this summer will target the ruins of two Medieval castles near Norrköping. Christian Lovén and I have selected these two because unusually, both have curtain walls (Sw. ringmur) but do not seem to have belonged to the Crown. The High Middle Ages in Sweden are poorly documented in surviving written sources, but in one of these cases we actually have a pretty good idea who built the castle and when.
Landsjö in Kimstad parish enters the record in about 1280 when an old woman writes her will. She’s Kristina, daughter of a certain Faste who had borne a plant device on his coat of arms and is otherwise forgotten, and she signs Landsjö as her sätesgård manorial seat. Lady Kristina’s late husband, dead since about 1255, had been a well-known and powerful man: Lord Holmger, son of Folke jarl and male originator of the Ama family.
The late 13th century saw the first major wave of masonry castle construction in Sweden, and so Landsjö castle is unlikely to pre-date 1250. On the other hand, after the Black Death in 1350 Landsjö was farmed by tenants and thus no longer a manor of the nobility. Lady Kristina’s will marks a likely point in time when the castle would originally have been completed. In 1630 Landsjö again became a manor, a new säteri building was constructed elsewhere and the old castle was heavily quarried for building materials. Since then little seems to have happened on the castle islet.
Things are less clear at Stensö in Östra Husby. This castle starts as a single round kastal-type tower with no entrance from ground level, most likely about 1200. But the first written mention of the farmstead occurs only in 1359, when it is the manor of Holmger Torkelsson of the Boat family. The castle has a curtain wall with some brick in it which is likely to have been added at some time during the preceding century. No later than 1480 this property too loses its manorial status and is farmed by tenants.
This 14th century Lord Holmger belonged to the high nobility. Both his father and his maternal grandfather were members of the Royal Council. The grandfather was Ulf Holmgersson of the Ama family, and wouldn’t you know it, the son of Lady Kristina of Landsjö! Christian points out that the sources tell us Lord Ulf owned property near Stensö among other places, but we do not know where his seat was. A possible scenario is that the Ama family handed down both ambitious castle-building traditions and the name Holmger from Lady Kristina’s time on. Today Stensö castle boasts one of Sweden’s best-preserved kastal towers, and it is particularly accessible since the 19th century when a landowner had most of the rubble cover carted away as lime-rich soil improvement.
Neither of these sites have seen any documented excavations. I believe my team will be able to contribute a lot of interesting data in our four weeks of fieldwork.
Most of the information given above is taken from Christian Lovén’s magisterial 1996 book, Borgar och befästningar i det medeltida Sverige. Its rich illustrations and 23-page English summary make it eminently approachable even to people who don’t read Scandy.