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Urban Variation – Utopia, Planning and PracticeInternational Symposium at the University of Gothenburg 19th to 22nd of February 2013

With Our Meager Resources...

Jönköping – an unfinished fortified town of the 17th century.

During my brief moment in the spotlight I will try to describe the development of one Swedish 17th century town that we happen to know quite well from three decades of archaeological excavations. Today we have access to observations from about 40 % of the built up area from the Early Modern Period in Jönköping. My aim is to use the history of this site as something of a metaphor, an illustration of the Swedish realm during its so called Age of Greatness. It exemplifies both the visions for the future, held by the Absolutist State – and the consequences these often unrealistic plans had for ordinary people. It is urban planning and practice seen from below, from a micro perspective that gives us a glimpse of the true cost of these grand designs!

1. Let’s begin here. With a propaganda picture of Jönköping, made in 1690. What we see is a fairly large town – from a Swedish point of view – dominated by its huge fortress to the west and the new church, named after Queen Christina, to the east. Between them, amidst all the wooden one or two storied townhouses, we can also see the first large stone building in the town – the Göta Hovrätt Court of Appeal.

Although widely exaggerated, the picture is correct in stressing the importance of the military, the administration and the protestant church for the 17th century town.

To summarize the background - Jönköping belongs to a large group of Scandinavian towns that were relocated and provided with a new town plan during the 17th century. The aim was to modernize and even fortify a number of strategically important cities of the Realm, but lack of funding and other resources prevented some of these projects to become reality. The visions of King and Council were at times too far removed from the somewhat harsh realities of a poorly developed country on the fringes of Europe. Even so, these undertakings in the 17 th

century were on a scale rarely seen in this part of world before. Its lasting results meant that the Renaissance town with its rectilinear plan

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was to be seen as an ideal for urban life for centuries to come – and in some respects still remain so.

2. But why Jönköping? What made this a suitable place for such an enterprise and investment? A quick look at the map will tell us why. First of all – this was one on the most important junctions in southern Sweden. Roads from east to west met roads coming up from the coast and the Danish counties of Scania and Halland. And as if that was not enough the vast lake Vättern could provide 130 km of sailing, straight into the Swedish heartland. Plus a fine natural and sheltered harbor. Not to mention the fact that the surrounding hills were rich in iron – the handling of metal being one of the cornerstones in the local economy from the oldest times.

But this was also a border town although it surprisingly enough was unfortified during most of the Middle Ages and well into the 16th century until the disused Franciscan Friary was converted into a Royal Castle by King Gustav I in 1545.

In the following century ambitious plans were made for turning the town – after the devastating fire of 1612 – into a modern city fortress. The central link in a chain that was meant to close the southern border of the realm to Danish attacks. And also a town where the impressive fortifications gave shelter to the army supplies and a strategic manufacturing. A town for modern times indeed!

3. But in the beginning one had to look for good examples abroad. The first draft of a new town might have been made by King Karl IX himself. Although it looks like something scribbled on a paper napkin, the plan gives a good picture of what he wanted. Basically, it’s a low budget version of a city fortress protected by water and marshes in the fashion favored in Italy and the Low Countries during the late 16th century.

We have the main street with two rows of plots with houses, a simple wall and ditch to the east and the castle to the west. Just about as much as you could find room for on the narrow spur of land between the two lakes and the area with the ominous name of The Morass…

It is also worth noticing how exposed this new site was – as winter storms on Lake Vättern can be very forceful indeed…

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4. But this was just a vision – the wish of a sovereign – until the siege and fire of 1612. When the medieval town, situated on dry and higher ground west of the castle had become charcoal and ashes, the King and his council acted rapidly. A decision was taken that the town should be re-built on the new site, hitherto called “Sanden”. The citizens complained and protested eloquently, but to no avail. The word of Gustav II Adolf stood firm and the laying out of new plots started in 1614.

During the first years a number of drafts for the new town were made. Some features re-occur like the canals, the inner harbor and the circle of large fortifications, surrounding and protecting the city centre.

But it’s worth mentioning that there is also a hidden story about resistance against the decisions of the absolutist state. Because there was a settlement on the site of the old town! “Förstäderna” – The Suburbs – did exist until the 1640s when the inhabitants were forced to move. Not all good citizen obeyed orders – but unfortunately we know too little about this group of people on the fringe today…

5. Excavations from the 1980s onwards have shown the scope of the undertaking. An estimated 20 000 wagon loads of soil had to be transported into the site of the new town during the first 10 years just to build up enough ground for the first houses to be constructed upon.

But more than soil was needed – huge amounts of timber and stone for the foundations were also carried in. For these transports peasants from the surrounding districts were called upon by the Crown.

The Crown also ordered soldiers to take part in this work – at least for the areas staked out for the strategic manufactures that were to play such an important part in the 17th century town.

6. Parts of the plots given away were actually beneath the water of Lake Munksjön. Or situated in the bog that King Karl IX quite correctly had called the Morass on his first draft.

Here the peat was found beneath landfill and house remains during the excavations in 2007. The weight of material put on top had compressed the peat, causing more landfill, compressing more etc etc. No wonder

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that severe floods were reoccurring in the first century of the new towns life…

7. The landfill had an interesting story to tell. These “clean” strata of sand were first identified in the Royal Chartered Arms factory site in 2004. What we see in the picture is sand – the original beach, covered by debris from the building of wooden structures nearby. But on top of that is more than 50 cm of sand, taken from a site where the archeobotanical evidence tells us of ruderal plants from a dry, built up environment. This was the foundation for the oldest workshops and living quarters in the factory area – the floor planks from that simple barrack, built in the early 1620s, can be seen resting on the sand.

8. If we look at Heinrich Thomes wonderful map from 1624-25 it is possible to trace the flow of material for landfill from the former site of the town and from the castle where extensive work was done during these crucial years.

We can also see some datings, taken from our dendrochronological analysis, showing just how fast this huge undertaking progressed – the building of a new city on virgin – and quite unsuitable – ground. Another important detail is the thin lines showing the planned city fortifications, existing toll fences and the vast marshes to the south east.

Thomes map is special because it gives a true description of the state of things in this vast construction site after ten years of hard work. It was made for someone with a good grasp of the local situation – probably the King himself. And a number of details have been compared to the archaeological evidence over the years. It is worth noticing that a brand new church has been added. It was paid for by the King himself and replaced S:t Nicholas, the large medieval town church that had remained in use for more than ten years after the fire of 1612. And just as in Kalmar this, the last stone building in the old town was blown up. Thome writes “ruins of Church” on his map.

9. As for the timber, it has been possible to identify the place where many of these large pine trees, used in the first phase of ground work, came from. They were taken from the nearby Royal Manor of Ryhov, an estate created by the Crown in the 1550s to supply the castle and its garrison.

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10. But as the years went by work on the Grand Design of a New Jönköping slowly came to a halt. About half the area planned for the city was actually used in the 17th and early 18th centuries. And although the town was seen as of the greatest importance to the defense of Sweden, there were never enough resources to start building the ring of fortifications in earnest. Instead one generation of simple toll fences followed another. And as only the northern half of the system of canals was dug, the ditches and the inner harbor filled with stagnant water… But at least the monumental space in the form of a square had been added.

11. The Peace Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 changed everything. Jönköping was no longer a border town and the area staked out for the fortifications could be used for other purposes. But even so, traces of what was to have been are still visible in the maps from the mid 18 th century with cultivated plots instead of houses and the first stretch of a wall street leading to these small gardens.

12. So much for the fortifications. But let’s have a look at the monuments of the civil settlement – the grand and costly buildings of Jönköping in the 17th century. It’s worth noticing the Swedish Coats of Arms right above the main entrance to Christine Church – a town church named in honor of the daughter of the founder of the new Jönköping. It’s also telling that a stone church was not of the highest priority. Instead the new Court of Appeal was. The symbol of a reformed judicial system was built 10 years before the church was started. The congregation had to endure for another decade or two in its barnlike little timber church. After all, Jönköping was a project for the strong State and its administration.

13. Another important undertaking was the foundation of two Royal Chartered factories in 1620. By centralizing strategic production for the army and navy to the fortified new town the flow of vital supplies for the armed forces was secured. Theoretically. In reality most of the local gunsmiths choose to stay in their farms, spread all over the region. And the authorities and director had to give in. What mattered was the production of guns, not the organization in detail of that production.

Still, the manufacturing of firearms in Jönköping (later on in Huskvarna) became of great importance. It was a high tech world characterized by rapid development and an early example of division of labor. It was a

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craft based upon a long local tradition that was transformed into a kind of early industry.

14. The other Royal Chartered Factory in Jönköping was quite another story altogether. Here a group of local businessmen were asked to start a large scale production of textiles, mainly cloth for the army and navy. Know-how was brought in from abroad by hiring skilled craftsmen in Germany. They came to establish an enclave in the central part of town, called the German Meadow. There they were settled; being a group favored by the State, well paid and able to uphold a more modern, continental urban lifestyle than their Swedish neighbors. We know of tensions from written sources, and the archaeological material indicates such problems too.

As for the production it started with unrealistic goals and the local raw material, the wool, proved to be insufficient in quality. Another problem was that it proved difficult to engage Swedish workers in the production of textiles. After less than 30 years the manufacturing came to a halt, the reasons mentioned above combined with devastating floods and a period of peace – meaning no more orders coming in from the Crown…

15. Finally – let’s have a look at the Jönköping castle, its development and some clues to a troubled building history provided by archaeology in the last two years.

Originally it was a Franciscan friary, founded in 1283. It was taken over by the Crown after the dissolution of the religious houses in Sweden and transformed into a castle after the Dacke rebellion in 1542-43. During the Nordic Seven Years War the castle was burnt by its retreating defenders in 1567 and left as a ruin. Re-building started in 1595 and was led by Dutch master builder Hans Fleming. The result was a modern artillery fortress with corner bastions, curtain walls with casemates and a large bailey. It withstood a short siege in the summer of 1612 but apart from that was never tested in battle. The building activities were continued on and off until the late 1650s, when Jönköping Castle became obsolete because of the Roskilde Peace Treaty in 1658. The central buildings were used by the local administration until the devastating fire of 1737 while the fortifications were left to slowly fall into decay.

16. In 2011 – 12 excavations in the SE-corner of the 10 hectare fortress have revealed surprising differences in the quality of the walls. The west and

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north flank of the bastion vary a lot in thickness and where one would have expected solid walls, they turned out to be hollow and filled with debris. This was an example of a surprisingly shoddy workmanship; something that would have endangered the safety of the castle in case of a siege.

17. Furthermore, the bastion Carolus was built on insufficient foundations and had in fact been in danger of a collapse almost since day 1. Fleming himself asked the King in 1617 if the bastion could be torn down, as serious cracks in the masonry had been noticed. Parts of the walls had also started to sink. However he was not allowed to do so by the King, as the political situation was considered too threatening.

18. Other defects revealed by the excavations of Fleming’s fortress include the exclusion of a planned casemated gallery for musketeers in the lakeside (eastern) wall. It was probably given up as a means to save some money for the Crown during the financial crisis of the 1610s, caused by the huge ransom to be paid to Denmark to get the castle of Elfsborg back after the Kalmar War.

More important was that a section of wall on the lakeside was obviously never built at all. King Gustav II Adolf did complain in 1630, asking “why the hole in the eastern wall of Jönköping castle had not been filled”. Two years later he asked that question again… And our archaeological evidence tells us the same thing. A simple earth wall, nothing more, was all there ever was. Furthermore, the NE bastion remained an earth structure. The reason for these defects in a major fortress was that the chosen ground couldn’t bear the weight of a stone building. The lessons from bastion Carolus were learned the hard way, leaving the fortress with one weak and dangerous spot.

19. Even the mortar in the walls still standing tells the same story about the varying quality. In some parts the lime mortar is an almost perfect mixture, while in other sections such as the makeshift wall from 1612, the adhesiveness must have been low indeed. Haste and pressure makes no good conditions for high quality craftsmanship…

20. To sum it up – if the excavated parts of these 17th century fortifications are representative for the quality of all defensive structures surrounding the castle, then the central link in the chain of fortresses was indeed

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weak. Modern plans and a highly qualified master builder like Fleming could do little if the surveys undertaken left out important facts, if the funding was insufficient or if the work force was untrained or unsuitable for the task.

21. And to a large extent this is the story of the new city of Jönköping. Although it was undeniably important to the Crown, the resources to finish the task of building the Ideal Town were never present. The Visions may have been grand enough, but the harsh realities were that other projects – such as Gothenburg and Kalmar – had a higher priority. It is also worth noticing the ambivalence shown by the Government towards this city fortress project when decisions were changed or reversed. So…

The city fortifications stayed on the drawing table

Only about half of the area originally intended for the new town was actually used

The castle might have looked impressive enough, but had a number of concealed weaknesses.

One Royal Chartered Factory, meant to modernize textile production in Sweden, became a failure.

An economy based on war production was vulnerable – and what was probably the worst crisis ever in the history of the town came in 1721 when the Age of Greatness ended. Jönköping had to adjust to more peaceful times and that process was indeed a difficult one …