A Danish royal castle on an island in a north Zealand fjord, used for three centuries as the kingdom’s state prison — Bishop Valdemar, Duke Valdemar IV of Schleswig and Archbishop Jens Grand were all held here — and the place where Margaret I was born in 1353 to a mother her father had imprisoned.
Søborg Castle stands in north Zealand, a few kilometres inland from Gilleleje on the Kattegat coast. In the Middle Ages the site was an island in a fjord that opened to the sea, so the castle could be reached only by boat and supplied only with the crown’s permission. The fjord silted and shrank into Søborg Lake, and the lake itself was drained between 1872 and 1896 when a canal was cut to Gilleleje, leaving the ruin standing above flat farmland.
The fortress was reckoned one of the strongest in the kingdom, and its strength determined its use. Denmark had no shortage of castles; it had very few places where a king could keep an archbishop for years without risking a rescue.
Tradition gives the castle to Eskil, archbishop of Lund, the formidable churchman who quarrelled with Valdemar I over the liberties of the Danish church. The attribution has been repeated since the seventeenth century, and the castle then passed to the crown after Eskil’s fall.
Excavations led by Robert Egevang in 1985 complicated the story considerably. They dated the castle proper — the masonry fortress whose ruins survive — to the late thirteenth century, which is more than a hundred years after Eskil’s death in 1181 and makes his authorship of that building impossible. The oldest enclosure found on the site was an earthwork rampart some eleven metres across, which may well be the twelfth-century work the tradition remembers. The dig also recovered floor tiles showing that the technique had reached Denmark from Lombardy earlier than had been supposed. The safest statement is that there was a stronghold here in Eskil’s century and a great castle here in the next.
Søborg’s recorded history is largely a list of prisoners. Bishop Valdemar Knudsen, who claimed the Danish throne and rebelled against Cnut VI, was held in the castle from 1198 until 1206, when papal pressure secured his release on condition that he leave the kingdom. Valdemar IV, duke of Schleswig, was confined there in 1285 and 1286 in the long struggle between the crown and the Schleswig line.
The most notorious captivity was that of Jens Grand, archbishop of Lund, seized in 1294 by Eric VI for his part in sheltering the outlaws who had murdered Eric V. He was kept in irons at Søborg until he escaped, by tradition through the castle latrine, and the scandal cost the king a papal interdict and a crushing fine before a compromise was reached in 1303. The nobleman Buris Henriksen is also remembered among the castle’s prisoners.
In March 1353 the castle’s prison held a queen. Valdemar IV Atterdag had confined his wife Helvig of Schleswig at Søborg, and their daughter Margaret was born there. The reasons for Helvig’s confinement are not recorded in any way that can be relied upon, and she disappears from the record afterwards; what is certain is that the future ruler of three kingdoms began life inside her father’s state prison.
Margaret was married at ten to Haakon VI of Norway, ruled Denmark and Norway in the name of her son Olaf IV and then in her own right, brought Sweden under her control, and in 1397 assembled the union of the three crowns at Kalmar. She died aboard ship in Flensburg Fjord in 1412, and the arc of her life runs from one Danish shore to another.
The castle was still inhabited in the early sixteenth century and was probably destroyed during the Count’s Feud, the civil war of 1534 to 1536 that ended with the Reformation in Denmark and the accession of Christian III. It was not rebuilt: in 1577 the crown’s tenant was given leave to take stone from the ruins, and the walls were mined for building material for generations afterwards.
What survives is the plan of a substantial fortress — curtain walls, tower footings and the earthworks of the older enclosure — on a low rise above drained fields, with the church of Søborg village nearby. The water that made the place has gone, which makes its whole history difficult to picture until the old shoreline is pointed out.