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Boteå, June 1564

Strange Happenings

The Ångermanland Uprising

Boteå church, where the ting of 1564 was held
Photo: Henrik Sendelbach / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In June 1564 a stormy ting assembled at Boteå. Knut Haraldsson, envoy of King Erik XIV, had come to demand that the farmers of Ångermanland supply fresh young men as soldiers for the king's war. The farmers of north and south Ångermanland joined together and openly refused. Their desperate answer survives in the official ting protocols: they could not go to war until the harvest was in, for the famine was so severe that they had 'nothing else to eat but bark'. This open defiance of royal authority in the middle of a burning war is one of the earliest well-documented acts of popular resistance in Norrland history.