COLONISTS ON THE SHORES OF THE GULF OF FINLAND MEDIEVAL SETTLEMENT IN THE COASTAL REGIONS OF ESTONIA AND FINLAND Editor: Marjo Poutanen CONTENTS Photo editor: Anu Mönkkönen Museum team: Inka Keränen, Andreas Koivisto, Jutta Kuitunen, Anu Introduction.................................................................................................4 Mönkkönen, and Marjo Poutanen Georg Haggrén Translation: articles translated by Jüri Kokkonen, except for Villu Kadakas’ The Colonization of Western Uusimaa in the Middle Ages..........................7 article, edited by Inka Keränen. Other texts: Johanna Suokas Villu Kadakas First results of new excavations in Padise Monastery. Cover image: General map no 1 of Uusimaa Province, Samuel Broterus, Further study issues...................................................................................27 1690s / Finnish National Archives Design and layout: Ten Twelve OÜ Tapio Salminen Printed: N-Paino Oy, Lahti 2011 Fishing with Monks – Padis Abbey and the River Vantaanjoki from 1351 to 1429......................................................................................37 ISBN: 978-952-443-354-9 ISSN: 0783-9162 Andreas Koivisto Settlement at the Gubbacka Site.............................................................67 Vantaa City Museum publications no 22 Janne Heinonen Earth Fill and Medieval Law at Gubbacka in Vantaa................................79 The material reflects the authors’ views and the Managing Authority cannot be held liable for the information published by the project partners. Notes...........................................................................................................90 2 3 INTRODUCTION The Settlers on the Gulf of Finland - Colonizing the Coasts of Estonia and Archaeological studies aim to create a picture of life in the Middle Ages Finland in the Middle Ages seminar took place at Lumo Hall in Korso, Vantaa, in both the Vantaa region and Padise monastery. Another objective is to on November 12-13, 2010. analyze the contacts between the two regions. Archaeologist Villu Kadakas, M.A., presents the results of the first excavations in the Padise monastery. The seminar was part of the PAVAMAB - Padise-Vantaa the Middle Ages Meanwhile, archaeologist Andreas Koivisto, M.A., describes how the Bridge - project that focuses on medieval history. The project constitutes medieval village of Gubbacka in Vantaa was colonized. Janne Heinonen, part of the Central Baltic Interreg IV A program, which will end in 2012. The B.A., tells about land use in Gubbacka from the perspective of archaeological project partners consist of Padise municipality in Estonia and the City of material and medieval legislation. Vantaa in Finland. Cooperation between the two parties is natural, since the regions have had contacts already in the Middle Ages. Vantaa’s predecessor, Helsinge Parish, is first mentioned in writing in a document related to Padise Leena Hiltula monastery. The document reports that King Magnus Eriksson in 1351 granted Museum Director the monks of the monastery the right to fish in the crown-owned waters of the River Vantaanjoki. Jutta Kuitunen Project Coordinator The PAVAMAB project is an interesting example of how historical roots can lead to present-day profitable cooperation. The project enables wide-range Marjo Poutanen research on archives and archaeology, and also translates into a thought- Project Assistant provoking discussion forum for researchers. Besides this publication, the concrete results of the project will consist of a joint book presenting the partners’ research results, a touring exhibition of the project themes, as well as a public seminar in Estonia. The seminar held in Vantaa presented medieval Gulf of Finland from various perspectives. The articles included in this publication are built on the seminar lectures. Adjunct Professor of Historical Archaeology at University of Helsinki, Georg Haggrén, Ph.D., describes exhaustively the colonization of Länsi Uusimaa in the Middle Ages. The article by Tapio Salminen M.A. of the University of Tampere focuses on contacts between Padise and Helsinge Parish from 1351 through 1429. Salminen is currently writing a work on the Middle Ages in Vantaa as a part of the city’s history book series. 4 5 THE ColoniZation OF Western UUSIMAA IN THE MIDDLE AGES Georg Haggrén PhD Adjunct Professor in Historical Archaeology University of Helsinki THE TRADITIONAL VIEW The region of Uusimaa (Sw. Nyland) has traditionally been regarded as an area that was not settled until the Early Middle Ages, literally a new land, which would have been almost without settlement at the end of the Iron Age. According to this view, the coastal regions of the province were colonized from Sweden, while the inland parts received their settlers especially from Häme. This viewpoint is crystallized in Suomen kulttuurihistoria (A Cultural History of Finland), which appeared in the early 2000s: “The barren unsettled shores of Uusimaa were for a long while a zone of long-distance exploitation of the Häme Finns of the inland… It was not until the arrival of Swedish colonists in the 12th and 13th centuries that the northern shores of the Gulf of Finland were populated.”1 Uusimaa is not the only region in Finland which has raised the issue of the lack of settlement at the end of the Iron Age. A similar description of settlement has also been given for Ostrobothnia and even the Åland Islands are suspected to have been without settlement at the turn of the Viking Age and the Middle Ages before being colonized from Sweden.2 The idea of the origin of the Swedish-speaking population of the coastal regions already crystallized at the end of the Middle Ages, as can be seen from the preface to Mikael Agricola’s Finnish translation of the New Testament, among other sources: “… the coastal population of Uusimaa, in the provinces of Borgo [Borgå, Porvoo] and Raasburi [Raseborg, Raasepori] and the islanders of Kaland [Kalanti] and the Ostrobothnians who even now speak Swedish, had first come from Sweden or Golland [Gotland].”3 It was only with regard to 7 the settled area of Finland Proper (Southwest Finland), Häme and Karelia farms is available, but in order to chart the abandonment of settlements, that scholars agreed that settlement had continued from the Iron Age to the the study was extended chronologically to the 1690s. There were some Middle Ages. 900 medieval village and hamlet sites or single farms in Western Uusimaa, comprising approximately 2,600 farmsteads in the 1550s. As the research The archaeological notion of the lack of settlement in Uusimaa during the Viking progressed, it could be demonstrated that there were village and hamlet Age was based on the scarcity of Iron Age finds: hardly any cemeteries were sites in the region that had already been abandoned before the 1540s.8 known from the region and only individual stray finds had been recovered. The only exceptions in Uusimaa have been the areas of Lepinjärvi in Karjaa Based on the inventories, several archaeological excavations were carried out and Bonäs–Fastarby in the inland part of Tenhola, from where Late Iron Age in Western Uusimaa in the 2000s, at both Iron Age and medieval sites. While level-ground cremation cemeteries are known. Even Iron Age settlement at some of the fieldwork was for purely research purposes, there were also Karjaa, which has been regarded as rich, is regarded to have disappeared salvage excavations of antiquities threatened by building projects. This work during the Viking Age.4 led to changes in the overall picture of the Iron Age in Uusimaa. The conception of no settlement in Uusimaa during the Late Iron Age has One of the most extensively investigated sites in Western Uusimaa during been so established that for a long while antiquities of the Iron Age were the first decade of the 2000s was the Hanko village (Hangö) area in the not even sought. It was not until the end of the 20th century that new pollen northern part of Hankoniemi Cape. As early as 1998, amateur archaeologists analyses began to undermine this notion, but even now Iron Age activity in had already found Iron Age ceramics and few Viking Age artefacts at the site. the region has been interpreted as mainly wilderness utilization and long- The location was Gunnarsängen, the site of the medieval village of Hangö. distance slash-and-burn cultivation.5 Excavations in 2003 revealed more ceramics but no signs of fixed structures. During the following three summers, excavations were continued in other OUR MARITIME Heritage AND other PROJECTS Since the turn of the millennium, the early history of Western Uusimaa has been studied in several projects, as a result of which our traditional views of the origin of settlement in the region have been questioned or at least clarified. The overall picture of the colonization of Uusimaa is no longer as straightforward or black and white as it was less than a decade ago. The incomplete and outdated archaeological inventory of antiquities in Western Uusimaa improved considerably at the beginning of the 2000s. In 2002, the three-year EU LEADER+ project ”Vårt maritima arv – Merellinen perintömme” (Our Maritime Heritage) was launched. It included a systematic survey of antiquities in the archipelago and coastal zone of the region from Bromarv in the west to Helsinki in the east. This work was completed in 2005, and as a result we now have an up-to-date inventory of known prehistoric antiquities and a large number of sites from historically documented times.6 A project funded by the Kone Foundation on the Western Uusimaa archipelago and coastal region in the Iron Age and Middle Ages began in 2003, within which the history of settlement, livelihoods and the environment in the whole region has been addressed through a few case studies.7 These projects also charted Late Medieval settlement by gathering information Fig. 1. A late medieval oven foundation excavated in Lapsen puisto park in the village on all the villages and hamlets of Western Uusimaa and the numbers of farms of Hanko. The oven overlay earlier Viking Age and/or Crusade Period structures. in them. The starting point was the 1540s, from which the first data on specific Photo G.