Nilsson

Nilsson means the son of a Nils, Nils being the Swedish form of Nicholas, and for most of the middle ages that is all it meant: a fact about one father, remade at every birth. What makes the Swedish record unusual is how far up the realm that unstable word travelled. Sweden's nobility was not a caste of hereditary fiefs. The Alsnö ordinance of 1280 exempted from ordinary tax any man who could afford to put a mounted soldier in the king's cavalry, and the frälse that grew out of it came largely from the wealthier end of the peasantry. A castle a man built with his own money was his own, and there was no serfdom in the country at all.

So the men in the royal council were landowners rather than dynasts, entered in the documents by their fathers' names. The oldest of these families hold no patent of nobility at all; the earliest known Swedish patent dates from 1360, and nobility only became formally hereditary at the coronation of Eric XIV in 1561.

That is why the medieval roll of the name reads so strangely. Karl Nilsson (kluven sköld), a landowner who died in 1381, is catalogued not by a house but by his arms, a shield party per pale, and Peder Nilsson (sparre över stjärna), 1390 to 1463, was an esquire filed under a chevron above a star. The parenthesis does the work the surname could not: the only reliable way to tell one Nilsson from another was to look at what he carried on his shield.

Erengisle Nilsson the elder was born around 1350 into the Hammersta kindred, whose arms were that cloven shield and whose seat was the castle of Hammersta in Ösmo parish on Södertörn. His father Nils Ingvaldsson died in 1351, so the estate and its manorial rights came to him in infancy; he is also reckoned to have owned Tyresö. He was probably knighted in 1365, was district judge of Oppunda härad in Södermanland from 1384, sat in the royal council by 1386 at the latest, and became lawman of Södermanland between 1386 and 1393, an office he still held in 1405. On 8 September 1378, at Raseborg, he set his seal to a letter issued by Tord Bonde, and his arms show on it very clearly.

He married twice, first Margareta Bengtsdotter Bielke of Åkerö, who died in 1377, then Kristina Röriksdotter Bonde, who outlived him past 1428. He died on 11 November 1406. His daughter Katarina Erengislesdotter stands as owner of Tyresö between 1432 and 1440; Hammersta went to his son.

That son was called Nils Erengislesson, and the reason is the whole system in one household. The father was Erengisle, son of Nils. The son was Nils, son of Erengisle. When the boy in turn had a son and named him for his grandfather, the family arrived back where it started, at an Erengisle Nilsson, and the Swedish record has to call him den yngre, the younger, to keep the two apart. Nothing was inherited here except a first name and a castle.

The younger Erengisle Nilsson, son of the lawman Nils Erengislesson and Märta Magnusdotter, first appears in 1428, and everything he did afterwards happened inside the collapse of the Kalmar Union. In the summer of 1434 he took part in Guse Nilsson's siege of Stegeholm alongside Karl Knutsson (Bonde), was in the royal council by 22 January 1435 at the latest, and at the start of 1436 was trusted by Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson with the siege of Stegeborg. That spring he was made captain in Östergötland, and by 9 July 1437 he was bailiff of Axevalla hus in Skärv parish.

Early in 1439 he took command at Ringstaholm outside Norrköping, the previous holder Karl Kristiernsson (Vasa) having fled to Finland with his father, the councillor and governor Krister Nilsson (Vasa), after Karl Knutsson's coup. He then led the siege of Stegeborg with Herman Berman until its owner Nils Stensson (Natt och Dag) escaped to King Erik on Gotland, and was made bailiff of Stegeborg himself in 1439, a post he held until King Christian removed him in the spring of 1463. He was knighted at the coronation of King Christopher on 14 September 1441, was lawman of Öland the same year, and in 1442 was named to the college that governed the realm when the king was away. He died on 15 January 1469.

The property tells the rest. His first marriage, to Märta Håkansdotter, daughter of the knight Håkan Nilsson Topp, brought him Ulvåsa in Ekebyborna parish, where the couple lived until about 1442; he gave that estate up to their two children and kept Hammersta. On 14 January 1442 he married Birgitta Olofsdotter Tott, called Brita, daughter of the Danish councillor Olof Axelsson (Tott), and when his half-brother Bo Nilsson (Grip), knight and councillor, renounced all claim to Hammersta in 1451, Erengisle handed the castle with every cottage and farm under it to his young wife as her morning gift.

The Swedish roll of the name also claims a Scanian-Norwegian magnate who spent his life crossing all three kingdoms of the union. Olav Nilsson Skanke first appears in writing in 1424 as a royal official in Trondheim, was knighted in 1430 by Erik of Pomerania alongside his brother Peder, grew wealthy in land in both Norway and Denmark, and sat in the Norwegian council. Some time after 1430 he married Elisabeth Eskildsdatter of Scania, who owned large properties of her own and bore the Danish royal lion in her arms. King Christopher made him chairman of the commission set up to hear the complaints of Norway's citizens and chief official of Bergen, where he also commanded Bergenhus. The complaints were mostly about the Hanseatic League, which operated outside Norwegian law; getting no support from the king, Olav punished the offenders himself by harsh means and earned the League's lasting hatred.

After Christian I made peace with the Hansa, Olav kept attacking its ships anyway and was dismissed in 1453. He withdrew to his manor on Talgø in Ryfylke, fitted out a fleet, and ran a private naval war on the League from a base on the east coast of Scotland, his wife and both sons each commanding a ship; Elisabeth became known across northern Europe for it. In 1455 he captured the Swedish fortress of Älvsborg, which commanded the shipping between Denmark and Norway, and offered it to the Danes on one condition: his old office in Bergen, or the fortress went back to Sweden. Christian I had no choice, and Olav returned to Bergenhus in triumph. Hanseatic merchants killed him at Munkeliv Abbey on 2 September 1455, destroying the abbey and killing with him the bishop of Bergen, one of his sons and about sixty other Norwegians.

For a name with no house behind it, the late medieval council chamber is thick with it. Erik Nilsson (Oxenstierna) sat there between 1457 and 1467; Bengt Nilsson (Färla), dead in 1546, and Axel Nilsson Banér, dead in 1554, were noblemen of the generation that saw the union finally break; and Birger Nilsson (Grip), born in the 1490s and dead in 1565, sat in the council and was made a baron under the new hereditary titles of 1561.

The highest any of them reached was Svante Nilsson, of the Sture connection, born in 1460 and dead in 1511. He sat in the royal council and then governed the country outright as riksföreståndare, regent of the realm. The commonest kind of second name in Sweden, the one that meant only that a man's father had been christened for Saint Nicholas, spent a stretch of years at the head of the kingdom.

The weakness of a patronymic is that the archive cannot keep two men apart, and the clearest case in the Swedish record carries this name. Mickel Nilsson, lawman of Uppland, died in 1528 at Ärnäs in Kärnbo in Södermanland. He has come down with the family name Halvhjort av Ärnäs attached to him, earlier with the byname Krumme, and on top of that the nickname Svarte Skåning, the black Scanian, and arms showing a boat with two dragon heads. His daughter Brita, living in 1561, carries the same house name.

Almost none of it is his. The Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon notes that the family name itself probably arose from two people being run together, and that the guess making this Mickel a son of Nils Svarte Skåning is likely to be wrong. The lawman of Uppland bore a four-footed beast in his arms, probably a bear. It was a different Mickel Nilsson, of Björnskog in Hultsjö, dead around 1529, who seems to have carried the half-hart. Two men, one name, and a noble house named for the confusion.

What a man was called could still move with his work as late as the sixteenth century. Bengt Nilsson Schack of Skylvalla appears in the record of 1540 as Bengt Murmästare, Bengt the mason, and in 1548 as Bengt Skrivare, Bengt the clerk, before settling as Schack. He was living on Utö with his brothers in 1553 and moved to Arnöberg the next year.

His offices ran the length of two provinces. He was under-judge of Bro härad in Uppland in 1550 and its district judge from 1552, district judge of Selebo härad in Södermanland from 1551 until his death, bailiff at Ekolsund and later of Åker and Selebo, and governor of Östergötland in 1564. He was knighted, married Ingegärd Nilsdotter of the Schack of Hornby in 1557, and died in 1565.

After the sixteenth century the name goes down the social ladder rather than up it, and keeps working exactly as before. Nils Nilsson Behm the elder, born about 1617 and dead in 1673, was made a master silversmith in Linköping on 21 June 1648, and Nils Nilsson Behm the younger, about 1672 to 1720, took his burghership in the same trade and town on 14 March 1698. Another Nils Nilsson, dead in 1664, was an alderman and burgomaster of Stockholm and the city's own man in the riksdag; later ones were farmers and smallholders sent up from Östra Äspinge, Vrängebol, Stävie and Asarum, each needing his village pinned to his name before anyone could tell which Nils Nilsson was meant.

Then the revolving system stopped revolving. On 31 December 2019 the Swedish register held 155,093 people spelling the name Nilsson, with Nilson, Nilzon, Nihlzon, Nielson and a handful of other spellings behind it, 155,686 in all, the fourth commonest surname in the country. Every one of them inherited it rather than earning it at birth, which is the one thing no medieval bearer of the name did.

Outside the Hammersta line, the privateer who sold Älvsborg back to a king, the regent, the mason turned clerk and the two Mickels have no kinship between them that the record will support, and that is the point. They are not a family. They are the same sentence about a father, written out again and again for six hundred years, by people who happened to be standing in very different places when it was written.