Rundkvist, Martin. 2019. At Home at the Castle. Lifestyles at the Medieval Strongholds of Östergötland, AD 1200-1530. Östergötland County Administration. Linköping. ISBN 978-91-7488-477-7. 137 pp.
Category: Castles
Snapshots of Dalmatia
Here’s the photo album from my recent ten days on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. Most pix are from the town of Šibenik, various spots in the River Krka national park, the island of Zlarin and the hills north-east of Šibenik.
Dalmatia is an excellent December destination for a quiet vacation with walks, photography and reading.
Excavation Report from Skällvik Castle 2016
Two years ago myself and Ethan Aines headed the first professional excavation at Skällvik Castle, a 14th century stronghold. It’s near Söderköping, across the water from Stegeborg Castle, and may be seen as a fossil of an itinerant castle that sat on Stegeborg’s islet before and after the period 1330-1360. Skällvik Castle was at various times owned by the See of Linköping and the Swedish Crown, and was at least used by the provincial Lawspeaker as well.
Some of our main results were these.
- The written sources document activity at the castle in 1330-50. The coins we found extend that use period at least four more years to 1354. In 1356 there was a civil war and the nearby vicarage is known to have been attacked. This is a likely end date for the castle.
- We identified the castle guards’ day room, warmed by the bakery oven, where finds show that the guards spent their off-time fletching crossbow bolts and gambling with dice for money.
- We found a noblewoman’s seal matrix, dropped into the sea off the castle’s dock. Her full name and identity are unknown, but historians have helped us identify two men known from the written record who may be her father and her husband. There was still sealing wax stuck to the matrix under the verdigris.
Excavation Report from Birgittas udde 2016
Two years ago myself and Ethan Aines headed the first professional excavation at Birgittas udde, a small Medieval stronghold. It’s on a promontory into Lake Boren near the town of Motala, on land belonging to Ulvåsa manor. One of Ulvåsa’s first known inhabitants was a young strong-willed 14th century noblewoman who would one day become Saint Bridget of Sweden.
Our main results were these.
- The stronghold was built c. 1250-75, long before Bridget’s day.
- It was never used much, being kept in shape as a refuge but rarely inhabited.
- It sits on a Mesolithic settlement site coeval with the famous Motala sites nearby.
Pimp My Book Manuscript
Dear Reader, if you’ve followed Aard for a long time you will know that occasionally I make shameless requests for free skilled labour. I’ve asked you to pimp quite a number of things:
- 2008, March. My Bronze Age deposition grant proposal
- 2010, June. My 1st millennium AD mead-halls book manuscript
- 2013, July. The notes for my first set of lectures as head teacher on Archaeology 101 in Umeå
- 2014, April. My Bronze Age deposition book manuscript
Through this habit of mine and their generosity with their time, a number of Aard readers have ended up getting thanked in the prefaces to my books. And now the time has come again. I’ve finished another book, my seventh, and it’s about the High and Late Middle Ages. I’ve looked at (and excavated some of) the evidence for lifestyles at strongholds of the period in Östergötland province, Sweden, returning to the area of my mead-halls study. It’s my first big piece of historical-period archaeology. The work has been great fun and a great learning experience. So here it is (817 kB PDF file)! The title is:
At home at the castle. Lifestyles at the Medieval strongholds of Östergötland, AD 1200–1530.
I would be very grateful for comments, corrections and questions from Aard’s readers. Don’t be afraid to ask layman’s questions: I believe that all archaeology can and should be written in a manner accessible to a bright high schooler. But I’m sure I slip up occasionally. There are no illustrations in the file because inserting them is a hassle and some haven’t been made yet, but there will be many.
June Pieces Of My Mind #1
- My wife receives her second university degree today. In addition to her 15 years in journalism, she is now also a trained psychologist. Go YuSie!!!
- I assume 45’s lawyers cleared the covfefe tweet?
- Small but very satisfying discovery. In 1902 a Medieval coin is found at Skällvik Castle. The finder makes a detailed drawing of the coin and sends coin & drawing to the authorities, who promptly lose track of the coin. Gone. In 1954 a list is drawn up of twelve Medieval coins found at nearby Stegeborg Castle. In 1983 the list is published — and suddenly there are thirteen coins on it. And the additional coin has a completely unexpected date, for Stegeborg, which was ruinous at the time. And the coin looks identical to the one that went missing in 1902…
- Chinese prime minister offers voice of reason on climate, unlike POTUS. Yay, Republicans. Go you. /-:
- Jrette comes home from first pop gig without parents. Describes ace female guitarist+bassist.
- Whew, a final close call. The Johan & Jakob Söderberg Foundation comes through and saves my bacon for the last seven months that I plan to subsist on grants. Ample time to finish my castles book. Ask for me a year from now, and you shall most likely find me a contract archaeology man.
- 18th anniversary with YuSie! And tea, and sunshine!
- The HPV vaccine is already putting a big dent in the cancer statistics! And remember: here’s something young men can do to improve the health of future grandmothers. And to keep their penises wart-free.
- In Jrette’s opinion, I’m pretty frenetic.
- Almost bought Turkish bulgur. Then I remembered Erdogan and his rural power base. “Too bad, politically deluded durum wheat farmers”, said I, and bought wheat from Västergötland instead.
- I like novellas, 120-150 pp. Very few multihundredpage novels are worth the time.
- Cousin E beat me big at Patchwork again. Seems that with the summer approaching, the threat of having to sleep in the yard is no longer very effective.
- I think it’s pretty neat that the designer of a game is often not a particularly strong player of that game. Inventing something with emergent properties that others discover.
- The Wow Signal: it was a comet that hadn’t been discovered at the time.
- “Squamous” means “scaly”.
- “Rugose” means “has a folded/wrinkled surface” and is cognate with “corrugated”.
- “Gibbous” describes the moon when it’s between half and full, and descends from the Latin word for hump.
- Sorry to see the Tories get ahead of Labour in the UK elections. Right now it’s 47 to 40%. Some consolation though that UKIP has been wiped out entirely.
- Someone plz explain how the UK election result represents any diminished Tory ability to get stuff through Parliament! *confused*
- Haha, now I get it. Brits are super confused to have what us Swedes call “a normal coalition government”.
- Before coming into a song, a bass player will often do this little slide along a string, “bwoing”, to announce her presence. What’s that called?
- Here’s a piece of good news. During the past three summers’ fieldwork at Medieval castles, we dry-screened the dirt through 4 mm mesh. We also collected soil samples, a selection of which palaeobotanist Jennie Andersson has checked for carbonised plant remains. Jennie also found lots of tiny bones in the soil samples. Now osteologist Lena Nilsson has analysed the bones that Jennie found. And good news, as I said: no new animal species. If we had wet-screened the dirt through sub-4-mm mesh, we would certainly have found a greater number of bone fragments. But it would have been enormously costly in terms of money and labour. And it seems likely that we would not have identified additional animal species.
- I found my hair! It’s currently on my chest, below my navel and in an amazing profusion on the small of my back. Really been wondering where it had gone to.
- Listening attentively to the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” for the first time. What a strange & interesting production! It’s so dense and distant, kind of indistinct with no air in it. Like you’re underwater. Or nodding off on heroin, I imagine.
Paleobotany Of Four Medieval Strongholds
Palaeobotanist Jennie Andersson has analysed four soil samples for me, all from floor layers inside buildings at Medieval strongholds that me and my team have excavated in recent years. There’s one each from Stensö, Landsjö, Skällvik and Birgittas udde. Results were sadly not very informative.
Comments Jennie:
“Overall the fossil and carbonised botanical material in the samples, as well as the recent unburnt material, is meagre … No carbonised cereals were found. Three of the four samples did however contain rather large amounts of unburnt bones and scales from fish plus jurpa, a blanket term för amorphous burnt organic material which may represent bread, burnt food, cooking waste or animal fat. Both the fish bones and the cooking waste probably originate in household cooking and waste management … The presence of burnt weeds such as goosefoot, bedstraw, smartweed and clover (Chenopodium album, Galium spp., Persicaria lapathifolia, Trifolium spp.), all of which thrive on nutrient-rich, sometimes slightly damp and open ground and around farms, tally well with what we may imagine would have been common in a castle bailey or around a farm yard where livestock and people tread about every day and share space.”
Activities and Roles at the Castle
I’m writing an interdisciplinary book about lifestyles at Medieval strongholds in Östergötland province, Sweden. The central chapter “Activities and roles” is currently 8,900 words. Here are the section headers.
- Agriculture at arm’s length
- Baking bread
- Brewing
- Animal husbandry and the eating of meat
- Hunting and the eating of game and wildfowl
- Fishing and the eating of fish
- Cooking
- Dining and drinking
- Waste disposal
- Relieving oneself
- Lighting
- Keeping warm
- Healthcare and personal grooming
- Fashion and jewellery
- Ladyship
- Chivalry and horsemanship
- Love affairs
- Weddings
- Growing up
- Religion
- Music
- Gambling and boardgames
- Writing
- Taxation, customs collection, rent collection
- Trade and other coin use
- Soldiering
- Imprisonment
- Slavery
- Keeping pets
- Smithwork
- Crafts in perishable materials
- Fur production
- Shipbuilding
Meal Remains From Castles: 2016 Osteology Reports
Supported by a grant from the King Gustavus Adolphus VI Foundation For Swedish Culture, osteologist Lena Nilsson has analysed the bones we collected during excavations last year at two Medieval strongholds. Two weeks with 19 fieldworkers at Birgittas udde produced only 0.4 kg of bones, because the site has no culture layers to speak of and the sandy ground has been unkind. But from the following two weeks at Skällvik Castle we brought home 32.7 kg of bones! And now Lena has looked at them all. Here are her reports:
The reports are in Swedish, but the species names and anatomical terms are given in Latin. Birgittas udde was occupied briefly in the 1270s but then seems to have been vacant, though kept in repair long into the following century. Skällvik Castle was occupied from 1330 to 1356 or shortly thereafter.
Lena is available for more work, and I’ll be happy to help readers get in contact with this seasoned osteologist.
Update 29 May: And here’s Lena’s report on the bones from Landsjö Castle 2015.
A Medieval Lady’s Seal
My detectorist friend and long-time collaborator Svante Tibell found a seal matrix in the field next to Skällvik Castle this past summer. In the Middle Ages of Sweden, people of means didn’t sign their names to documents. They carried seals around, with which they made imprints into chalk-mixed wax, and these were affixed to paperwork such as property deeds and wills. If you lost your seal matrix, you lost your ability to sign documents – and you theoretically gave that ability to whoever found your seal. When people died during this period, their seal matrices were carefully destroyed. Sometimes the pieces were buried with the dead person, such as in the case of Svante Nilsson (obiit 1512).
The seal matrix from Skällvik shows the letter T in a shield. This device is known from a different seal under a surviving document from 1331, around the time when the castle was built. And around the edge of the matrix is as usual an inscription. I have no training in reading Medieval writing, so I took the matrix to the National Archives, where Roger Axelsson and his colleagues enthusiastically helped me make sense of it.
According to Roger & Co, this is what the seal’s inscription says. The letters within parentheses are somewhat uncertain.
[S’_ _]S[O] V[X]ORI S[O]NO[N]V[M]
Sigillum …so uxori Sononum
The seal of …sa, wife of Sune
Annoyingly, the two completely illegible letters are part of this woman’s name. But Roger has a suggestion for who her husband Sune may be: Sune Ingvaldsson, who lived in Östergötland about the right time and whose wife’s name has been lost to history. The couple chose to be buried in Hällestad, a peripheral parish in the forest of NW Östergötland.
There’s one more annoying detail here, says Roger. The man with the similar T seal from 1331 was named Thorberg. But there is no known female name T_sa from the time. Why then has this woman got a T on her shield? I wonder if our unnamed lady might have been using her father’s coat of arms.
Anyway, our little points of annoyance are probably insignificant compared to how Sune’s wife felt when she dropped her seal into the sea just off Skällvik Castle’s dock, some time in the mid-14th century.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 