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102 Rising of the Dalesmen. HISTORY OF THE SWEDES. Apathy of the Helsingers. [1520—
for the maintenance of the foreign troops was
daily expected 4. The people murmured, and
complained that they had allowed Gustavus Ericson to
depart. In this, their new guests told them they
had done wrong ; such a noble leader they stood
much in need of ; many a worthy Swedish warrior
was now wandering like themselves, a fugitive in
the forests, who would never submit to the
domination of the Danes, but lead a free life so long as
he might, until Sweden should receive from God a
captain and chief, for whom he would willingly put
to hazard his life and welfare. The Dalecarlians
now sent off runners on snow-skates to seek out
Gustavus day and night, and bring him back.
They found him in the hamlet of Seln, in the
upper part of the parish of Lima, whence he
intended to seek a path across the mountains to
Norway.
He returned in their company to Mora, where
the principal and most influential yeomen of all the
parishes in the eastern and western Dales elected
him to be " lord and chieftain over them and the
commons of the realm of Sweden 5." Some
scholars who had arrived from Westeras, brought with
them new accounts of the tyranny of Christian.
Gustavus placed them amidst a ring of peasants to
tell their story, and answer the questions of the
crowd. Old men represented it as a comfortable
sign for the people, that as often as Gustavus
discoursed to them the north wind always blew,
" which was an old token to them, that God would
grant them good success." Sixteen active peasants
were appointed to be his body-guard ; and two
hundred more youths who joined him were called
his foot-goers. The chronicles reckon his reign
from this small beginning ; while the Danes and
their abettors in Stockholm long continued to
speak of him and his party as a band of robbers in
the woods.
Thus the Dalesmen swore fidelity to Gustavus,
the inhabitants, namely, of the upper parishes on
both arms of the Dal-elf, where a numerous people,
living amidst wild yet grand natural scenery, and
hardened by privations, is still known by that name.
Gustavus came to the Kopparberg with several
hundred men in the early part of February 1521,
there took prisoner his enemy Christopher Olson u,
the powerful warden of the mines, made himself
master of the money collected for the crown dues,
and of the wares of the Danish traders on the
spot, distributed both the money and goods among
his men, (who made their first standard from the
silk stuffs there taken,) and then returned to the
Dales. Not long afterwards, on a Sunday, when
the people of the Kopparberg were at church,
Gustavus again appeared at the head of fifteen
hundred Dalesmen. He spoke to the people after
divine service, and now the miners likewise swore
fidelity to his cause. Thereupon the commonalty of
4 This year the great silver-tax, for the payment of the
troops, was levied in Sweden. Hvitfeld. The Rhyme
Chronicle complains that it was rigorously exacted.
5 So the Dalecarlians express themselves in a subsequent
letter regarding this election. (Troil, Memoirs for the His-
tory of the Swedish Reformation, iv. 356.) It was therefore
the election of an administrator undertaken on their own
authority. It is also clear that Gustavus bore that title
previously to the election in Vadstena.
•> Swinhufvud (Swinehead), brother of Otho, bishop of
Westeras.
the mining districts and the Dalesmen wrote to
the commons of Helsingland, requesting that the
Helsingers might bear themselves like true Swedish
men against the overbearing violence and tyranny
of the Danes. Those cruelties which king
Christian had already exercised on the best in the land,
they said, would soon reach every man’s door,
and fill all the houses of Sweden with the tears and
shrieks of widows and orphans ; if they would take
up arms and show themselves to be stout-hearted
men, there was now good hope of victory and
triumph under a praiseworthy captain, the lord
Gustavus Ericson, whom God had preserved " as a drop
of the knightly blood of Sweden ;" wherefore they
begged them to give their help for the sake of the
brotherly league by which, since early times, the
commonalty of both countries had been united.
Ten years afterwards, the Dalecarlians recall the
fact7, that they had received a friendly answer to
the request which their accredited messengers had
preferred on that occasion, and that their
neighbours the Helsingers had promised to stand by
them as one man, " whatever evils might befall
them from the oppression of foreign or native
masters." When Gustavus had begun the siege
of Stockholm, every third man of the Helsingers
in fact marched thither to strengthen his army.
Yet at first they hesitated to embrace the cause,
although Gustavus himself went among them, and
spoke to the assembled people from the barrow on
the royal domain of Norrala. Thence he
proceeded to Gestricland, where fugitives from
Stockholm had already prepared men’s minds. The
burghers of Gefle, and commissioners from several
parishes, swore fidelity to him in the name of the
whole province. Here the rumour reached him,
that the Dalecarlians had already suffered a defeat;
he hastened back, and soon received an account of
the first victory of his followers.
Theodoric Slagheck8, the principal instigator of
the Stockholm massacre, had been appointed the
king’s lieutenant in Sweden. He was also inducted
into the see of Skara, vacant by the murder of its
bishop, as was Jens Beldenacke9 into that of
Strengness ; "strange men for such an office," says
Olave Peterson, " as they well proved by their
actions." They administered public affairs from
their station in the capital, in conjunction with
those of the Swedish councillors whom the axe of
the executioner had spared, or who did not blush
with such names to associate their own. The
magistrates of Stockholm, under the influence of the
Danish garrison and the Germans of the town,
whose hatred is said to have cost many of the
Swedish burgesses their lives1, showed at this time
great zeal for the cause of king Christian. Gorius
Hoist and Claus Boye, the former an accomplice,
the latter well-nigh a victim in the massacre, now
7 In another letter to the Helsingers. Troil, ibid.
8 Or as he was called in Sweden, Slaglioek. He was by
birth a Hollander, formerly a barber, and a kinsman of the
huckster Sigbrit, who, even after the death of her daughter
Divika, preserved all her influence over Christian.
9 Jens Anderson, so called from his baldness. He had
been bishop of Odense.
> " The Tyske redde fast thertill,
Som ene ville regera kopmansspill,"
(Thereto the Germans fast plans lay,
Alone in chapmanhede to sway,)
says the Rhyme Chronicle of the massacre of Stockholm.
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