Churches of Gloppen in Western Norway, part 3 - the medieval church of Hyen

 

Sunday, July 24, I gave a presentation about the now-lost medieval church of my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords, located in the hamlet of Hope. The presentation followed an outdoor church service held at the spot where that church most likely stood in the Middle Ages. This was not the first time a church service had been held in this location since the Middle Ages – there was a similar service in 1995 – but this time the service included the baptism of three children, a sacrament that has not been performed within the environ of the lost church for the better part of five centuries. Despite the rain, it was a momentous and joyous occasion.        

As I am preparing a short piece about the now-lost medieval church in the local parish magazine, I have put together a brief outline of what we know about this church, and what we can surmise from context. 

Raised in 1950, this stone commemorates the lost medieval church of Hyen. The work was initiated by the parish council, and the stone was found a few kilometers further up in the valley from where the church stood

The medieval church of Hyen         

The medieval church of Hyen first emerges in the sources in 1308, in a letter from the bishop of Bergen to the priests of the area. At this time, the Norwegian church organisation was immensely powerful, as it held much land and had a largely close – if occasionally turbulent – relationship with secular power. Several bishops were heavily engaged in the strengthening of ecclesiastical administration and jurisprudence, and one such bishop was Arne Sigurdsson, who became bishop of Bergen in 1295, an office he held until his death in 1314. Arne had studied law in Orléans and was part of a concerted effort to ensure the right living among priests, and that the church received its financial dues.    

The letter from 1308 was written at Gimmestad, a hamlet in the neighbouring fjord of Hyen, where there was a parish church in the Middle Ages (as there still is). Bishop Arne resided here during his visitation in the area, and he wrote this letter to the five priests of the area; Sigvat at Vereide, Bård at Re, Steinar at Austrheim, Kolbein at Gimmestad, and Hallstein in Hyen. Four of these priests were commanded to leave their concubines within five days of receiving the letter, or they would be suspended. Sigvat was suspended effective immediately – perhaps because his church, Vereide, was the richest of the churches in the area, and his status was therefore higher than the others. The practice of priestly concubinage was not uncommon in Latin Christendom, it was not a phenomenon unique to Norway, and it was something which eager reformers such as Bishop Arne wanted to eradicate from the church.

 We do not know exactly what happened after Bishop Arne had issued his letter, but we do encounter four of these priests in another letter from 1310, which suggests that they did either divorce their concubines or somehow managed to avoid suspension by other means. (The simplest explanation is that they separated from the concubines, but we should not exclude other possibilities.) In any case, the letter from 1310 is a response to a supplication by three of the priests of the area which is now Gloppen municipality. The supplication informed the bishop that Sigvat of Vereide had died, and the priests of Gimmestad, Eid, and Hyen asked the bishop to divide the income of Vereide church in such a way as to strengthen the situation for the other parish churches, since they would not have sufficient income to welcome the bishop on his next visitation otherwise. In his response, Bishop Arne rearranged some of the divisions of the parishes and church income, and the priest of Hyen was granted a twelve ‘cophinos’ or hampers – in Norwegian ‘laup’ – from the income of Vereide. That the priest in Hyen was granted this amount of income was because Hyen was the poorest of the parishes, and if the parish of Hyen was subsumed under the parish of Vereide – which it was after the Reformation – the people of Hyen would have a long and difficult road to travel to church. 

The medieval church was most likely located on this crag, where it could be seen by churchgoers coming up the valley by boat across the lake, or coming down the valley along the road that connected the various hamlets of the valley. The location where the churchgoers were believed to go ashore is called 'Kirkjevikja', the church bay. Remnants of a stone dock can be seen, although it is unclear whether this dates to medieval times.

From the supplication of 1310 we catch a somewhat better glimpse of the situation of Hyen parish. The village of Hyen comprises two long valleys and a fjord, and its people still live in far-flung hamlets within a wide circumference. While there were several farms in the hamlets of Hyen, it has nonetheless always had a much more difficult terrain for agriculture than what we find in the neighbouring fjord, and the income from tithes and other dues was not large.

From this starting point, we might also surmise a few other points about the church building. Due to the limited means of the parish, it is likely that it was a wooden church, a so-called stave church. Typically when we talk about stave churches, we think of some of the masterful buildings such as Borgund, Urnes, Hopperstad or Lom. The term ‘stave church’, however, pertains to the building technique and can also include much more humble churches, small, dark, and with room for standing only. It is likely that the church in Hyen was one of these smaller stave churches. Moreover, it is likely that the church was built in the course of the twelfth century, as this was a period when the Norwegian church organisation expanded its infrastructure and erected churches throughout the country. It was in this period that the church of Vereide was built, a church whose stone structure point to the greater income of the priest, and the importance of its location.         

Since the parish of Hyen was poor, we are also left wondering about the number of books kept in the church. Most parish churches were expected to keep a psalter, a missal, and a breviary for performing the basic liturgical services in the course of the church year. It is also possible that the church kept a volume containing the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles – five books typically kept within one volume in the Middle Ages, as the one-volume bibles were not common in parishes, especially not poorer ones. From fragments found in other parish churches in the fjords – albeit richer ones – it appears that even parish churches in the rural villages could possess quite a few liturgical and biblical books, but in the case of Hyen we are left to speculate about what would have been available for the poorer ones.            

The church of Hyen reappears in the sources thanks to a letter from the reign of Bishop Audfinn Sigurdsson (1314-1330), the brother of Arne. In this letter, Ragnhild from the hamlet of Ommedal in Hyen confirmed a testamentary gift which had been given by her mother Unna. The letter of confirmation was witnessed by several men of the village, from several hamlets, and the gift of two cows were to be given to Ivar, called Priest-son, from the hamlet of Hope. It is unclear whether the gift was to the church – which would entail that Ivar had taken over the office of his father Hallstein – or whether it was to Ivar as a private individual. Despite Ivar’s unpropitious situation as the son of a priest, and therefore also a bastard, it is not unlikely that he was given his father’s office. Despite the ideals of the Norwegian bishops, the practicalities of a church spread across a difficult topography such as Norway’s could easily entail a lack of personnel that met the demands of higher ecclesiastics.       

After this letter, we do not know much more about the church in Hyen. The traditional interpretation of its later history was that it fell into disrepair during the Black Death. However, we do not have any concrete evidence for such a fate, especially since it is unclear how strongly the plague ravaged the village of Hyen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is also possible that it became defunct following the Reformation of Denmark/Norway (1536-37), when the king became the supreme head of the church and reorganised the ecclesiastical infrastructure to do away with poorer parishes and expropriate church property. Until we conduct archaeological excavations of the area, we might never know.

The area around the stone is colloquially known as 'Kirkjegarden', literally 'the church yard', but also the Norwegian term for a cemetery. When the grass was placed on a hayrack to dry, the hayrack placed near the stone was called 'kirkjehesa', or the church hayrack. There are stories that older generations discovered remnants from the medieval cemetery, but these are unconfirmed.