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1523.]
His wanderings in
Dalecarlia.
GUSTAVUS VASA. THE LIBERATION.
Agitation against
the Danes.
101
laboured, and the house at Orness, where his life
(as was more than once the case) was saved by the
sympathy and decision of a woman. The place in
the forest at Marness7, where he lay three days
concealed under a fallen fir-tree, and the peasants
brought him food ; the hillock surrounded by
marshes, ou Asby moor8, which also served him for
some time as a place of refuge ; that cellar in the
hamlet of Utmedland 9, where he hid from his
pursuers ; the spot where he harangued the peasants
of the Dales, by the church of Mora ; all these are
still shown by the descendants of those who
formerly shared his dangers, which are as little likely
to be forgotten, as the treachery of Arendt Person,
or the good faith of Sweno Elfson.
The former was a nobleman, owner of the estate
of Orness, whither Gustavus proceeded from
Rank-hytta. A gold-embroidered shirt-collar, under the
woollen jerkin, had discovered the distinguished
thresher to a maid-servant at the latter place, on
which the master of the house, the rich miner
Anders Person, refused to harbour him any longer.
Arendt Person, as well as the latter-named
individual, had been the school companion of Gustavus
at Upsala, and received him now with friendly words
and assurances of welcome ; but went 011 the very
same day to Bennet Brunson, the king’s bailiff in
the district, with whom next morning he returned,
attended by twenty men, to seize his guest. The
object of their search had however disappeared ; its
failure was owing to Barbara Stigsdotter, the wife
of Arendt, who thus incurred the irreconcileable
enmity of her husband. Suspecting treachery in
him, she had warned Gustavus in the night, and
furnished him with a horse, sledge, and guide, by
which he escaped to Master Jon, the priest of
Swuerdsio. In this neighbourhood dwelt the king’s
ranger Swen Elfson, who, with his wife, now granted
shelter to the persecuted fugitive, and afterwards
accompanied him to his friends, Peter and Matthew
Olson of Marness, who kept him concealed in the
forest. It was 011 this journey that Gustavus was
wounded, being concealed in a load of straw, which
the emissaries of the bailiff were searching with
their spears ; and he would have been betrayed by
the blood dropping on the snow, had not the
faith-fill ranger taken the precaution, when unobserved,
of cutting his horse in the foot, so that it bled. Nor
must we decline to state, as an example both of the
dangers and manners of that time, that Gustavus
in his fugitive condition was obliged for his own
safety even to shed blood. His arrival in
Dale-carlia had now become notorious. Among those
whom Henry of Mellen, the king’s lieutenant in the
castle of Westeras, had despatched to this province
" to seize or kill him, or at least do him prejudice
with the Dalesmen," was Nicholas the West-Goth,
under-bailiff in Dalecarlia. Meantime, it is said,
Rasmus the Jute, a Daue, formerly a soldier with
Steno Sture, but now a resident in Dalecarlia, had
joined Gustavus. They surprised the bailiff at his
official abode in Mora, and slew him
worked as a thresher Gustavus Ericson, pursued by the foes
of the realm, but selected by Providence to be the saviour of
the country. His descendant in the sixth generation,
Gustavus III., raised this memorial." The barn still belongs to
the family of Sweno Elfson, and his eighth successor
received a medal from Gustavus III. in 17S7.
7 In the parish of Swserdsioe.
8 In the parisli of Leksand; it is still called King’s Hill.
Gustavus first spoke to the people at the church
of liettwick, and afterwards’at Mora in
Christmas-tide. He bade the old to consider well, and the
young to inform themselves, what manner of
tyranny foreigners had set up in Sweden, and how
much they themselves had suffered and ventured
for the freedom of the realm ; the remembrance
neither of Josse Ericson’s oppressions, nor of
Engelbert’s heroism, had yet died away in the
Dales ; Sweden was now trampled underfoot by
the Danes, and its noblest blood had been shed ;
his own father had chosen " rather with his
associates, the honour-loving nobles, in God’s name to
die2," than to be spared and survive them ; might
they now show themselves men who wished to guard
their native land from slavery, then would he
become, by God’s help, their chief, and risk life and
welfare for their freedom and the deliverance of the
realm. So, it is said, ran his discourse ; but the
matter was yet too new for the peasants of the
Dales. The rumour of Christian’s cruelties had
yet hardly penetrated to these distant quartet’s,
nor did they know this stranger who spoke to
them, and who, deserted by all others, sought there
a refuge. The peasants of Rettwick declared their
sympathy, but would undertake nothing unless after
deliberation with the other parishes. From the
men of Mora he received at this time an answer no
wise favourable ; they said that they were resolved
to remain true to the homage they had sworn to
king Christian, and bade him " take himself off
whither he could." In the last days of 1520,
Gustavus continued his flight over the wilderness which
separates East from West Dalecarlia.
Meanwhile the Dalesmen came to a better
disposition. Shortly after Gustavus quitted Rettwick,
several of the Swedish nobles of the Danish faction
arrived there with the view of securing his person.
Some peasants who saw them coming in with about
a hundred horse on the ice of lake Silian, hastened
to the church and rang the bells. The wind blew
towards the upper country ; a great concourse of
people assembled as was their wont on occasions of
common peril, and the strangers, who had sought
refuge, partly in the priest’s house, and partly in
the tower, which long afterwards shewed marks of
the Dalesmen’s arrows, could only ransom their
lives by the assurance that they would do no harm
to Gustavus.
About the new year there arrived at Mora
Lawrence Olaveson, a captain of great experience
in the service of Steno Sture the younger, and
shortly after a nobleman of Upland named John
Michelson. They drew so lively a picture of the
massacre in Stockholm, that the bystanders were
affected to tears. The Erics-gait of the king, they
said, was at hand ; his way would be marked by
gallows and wheel ; all the arms of the Swedish
peasants would be wrested from them and
consumed 3, and if their limbs were left unmutilated, a
stick in the hand would be the only weapon allowed
them for the future ; the imposition of a new tax
9 I11 the parish of Mora.
1 So the Manuscript Chronicles, which Tegel has not here
followed exactly.
2 Such is said to have been the answer of lord Eric
Johan-son, when Christian offered him his life.
3 This was actually done upon the king’s journey from
Stockholm, whence the peasants, as the Rhyme Chronicle
says, called him king Stock.
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