Finding Fredenborg

The great tithe theft of 1676

Every autumn the priest of Jerslev was owed a tenth of the parish harvest. The rule was strict: the sheaves stood in the field until the tithe was counted out on the spot, and only then could a farmer cart his grain home.

On a late-summer day in 1676 the priest's farmhand walked out to Kirsten Jensdatter's field on Jerslev mark to collect the priest's share. Anders of Fredenborg was waiting for him. The court book records what happened next with a straight face: Anders "came with a vognkæp", a wagon stake, "and attacked him, so that he had to turn for home with his business undone". Then, "that same night, Anders of Fredenborg carted the grain away from the field". The priest's tenth went with it, 1.6 km down the road to Svennum.

The priest, hr Laurs Jensen Bjørn, took him to the district court. The farmhand's testimony was entered on 31 August. On 19 October 1676 came the judgment. Anders "must procure title to the grain or suffer prosecution". In other words he was claiming the crop was his to take, and the court gave him the chance to prove it. Whether he ever did, the books do not say.

Anders was not the only one tempted that autumn. In the same session the estate bailiff Peder Galskøt summoned Jens Pedersen of Grindsted and the widow at Bøgen "because, against the prohibition, they have carried in their grain before it was counted on the field". But only Anders brought a wagon stake.

Jerslev herred court book, 31 Aug and 19 Oct 1676, in B. Nørgaard-Pedersen's transcription (brejl.dk). Quotations translated from the Danish summary.

A different family

This search began because Fredenborg appeared in the family tree. Ancestry and the family's own record joined Christen, son of Søren of Fredenborg, baptised here in 1698, to a Peder Sørensen born about 1724, and through him to Simon Pedersen of Lille Nejsum. That made Fredenborg look like the start of the Bøgh line.

Following every record we could find took the two families apart:

• The census taker made a slip. In 1787 he wrote Simon's father as "Peder Sørensen". The Hellevad marriage of 1760, the baptisms of 1761 and 1763, and the 1801 census all call him Peder Jørgensen.
• Peder Jørgensen has his own baptism. He was baptised in Jerslev on 6 November 1729, the son of Jørgen Pedersen and Mette Pedersdatter of Villestrup, not of anyone at Fredenborg.
• The names don't fit. A son of Christen Sørensen would be a Christensen, not a Sørensen. The reported 1746 death "at Fredensborg" is not in the Jerslev burials at all.

So the Andersens and Søren Jensen of Fredenborg are a separate family, with their own story, and that story is told here. The Bøgh family's real line, from Sterup and Villestrup to Klæstrup, is on The Bøgh Line.

Background: GeoDanmark spring orthophoto 2024 (Dataforsyningen, open data), requested for exactly this frame. Parish outlines are modern (DAGI, simplified) and sit close to the 1698 boundaries. Farms recorded only as a surviving road name are placed on that road. The two Trøgdrup villages are placed from Trøgdrupvej and Klausholm and are approximate. No distance on this page comes from a document; all are measured between modern coordinates. Hover a point for its evidence. The ring around Fredenborg reaches the Jerslev village fields where the 1676 tithe grain was taken; the dashed line is the journey to the Trøgdrup common.

Then and now: drag the divider

Three images of the same ground, each placed on the same coordinate frame: the 1884 General Staff sheet, positioned by its own survey grid; today's lidar terrain model; and the 2024 orthophoto. Drag the divider to wipe between any two; the contour sets can be chosen as a side on their own or laid over the top. The 1884 contours are at 5 Danish feet (1.57 m); the modern set is at 0.5 m or 2.5 m. The ravine west of the village, the burial mounds, the road junction and the farm ditch should coincide. They do, which is what lets the house symbols be trusted.

Fredenborg · 9a house

10a house · Hellumvej 23

ditch 1884 · pond today

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Frame: 57.27413–57.28946 N, 10.09786–10.13113 E, about 2.0 × 1.7 km. Sources: Generalstabens høje målebordsblad “Jerslev”, surveyed 1884 (Klimadatastyrelsen); Danmarks Højdemodel terrain hillshade and contours (Klimadatastyrelsen); GeoDanmark spring orthophoto 2024 (Dataforsyningen). Drag inside the frame to pan when zoomed.

The house, pinned: 57.2806 N, 10.1207 E

Best estimate of the Fredenborg house site is 57.28060, 10.12073, with an uncertainty of about 15 m. It is the north side of the Hellumvej 23 farmyard, 9740 Jerslev, about 25 m north of the present farmhouse, where the yard’s outbuildings stand today. The farmhouse itself occupies the site of the 1884 “10a” house.

How the point was placed: the 1884 General Staff 1:20,000 sheet “Jerslev” was triangulated from the national survey network, so unlike the cadastral sheets it needs no local anchor. It was positioned from its own neat lines and the published sheet footprint, then checked in Google Earth against the lidar contours, the roads and the ravine west of the village, all of which coincide. On it, two buildings stand north of the road by the smithy: a large one with a garden tree and a small one 50 m to its south-west, the same pair the 1884 cadastral sheet labels 9a and 10a. The small one falls 15 m from the present Hellumvej 23 farmhouse; the sheet’s blue ditch falls 11 m from the pond in that farm’s garden; the large one is Fredenborg. Two earlier placements, one anchored on the assumption that the farmhouse was the 10a house without rotation, the other on the pond and the Egelundsvej 3 farm, were 30 m and 95 m off and have been withdrawn. Google Maps: 57.28060, 10.12073.

The documents and maps behind the pin

Found: Fredenborg lay in Svennum

The Jerslev burial register, read from 1685 to 1700, names the house and its people. The decisive line is the first.

Together with the 1676 court entries (Anders and Peder Andersen of Fredenborg) and the 1698 baptism (Søren of Fredenborg), the house held a family of Andersens for at least a generation: Peder, Hans, Niels and probably Søren, sons of an Anders. The Anders Pedersen who served as Kølskegård’s agent in Jerslev from 1632 to 1654 remains the likeliest father, unproven. Svennum sits 1.5 km from the church inside the tithe disc, 3.3 km from Kølskegård, and on the Jerslev side of the parish: every independent constraint on the map is satisfied. The Sønder Trøgdrup reading is closed; the 1676 summons recorded a Svennum man with an interest in Trøgdrup common, not a resident.

Svennum in 1813. The Original 1 cadastral sheet (surveyed 1813, Jerslev–Klæstrup–Svennum sheet 2) shows Svennum as a street village along “Svennum Gade” with about ten farms, matrikel 1–10 and 12, and four or five small house plots, matrikel 11, 13, 14 and 15, strung along the street. Tenants named on the sheet include Peder Pedersen (6), Chresten Olesen (5A), Ole Nielsen and Chresten Thomsen (9), Chresten Nielsen (10), Niels Jensen (12), Peder Jensen Bak (8), Niels Svendsen (3) and a Bundgaard (1). No plot carries the name Fredenborg. The house is one of these fifteen holdings; the 1688 matrikel for Svennum, which lists each holding with its tenant in Fredenborg’s own decade, is the document that would say which.

Svennum in 1688. Christian V’s matrikel, modelbog for Jerslev herred (Rtk. 312, vol. 1781, folios 112–114), lists Svennum Bye as ten holdings. Hartkorn is the 1688 (new matrikel) total for each holding, in tønder : skæpper : fjerdingkar : album, followed by a fifth remainder figure the surveyors used below the album. Rows with a single value are read from the first figure of the totals line; some second figures remain uncertain.

Reading. Peder and Hans Andersen, both “i Fredenborg” in the register, hold nothing in 1688, so they lived in a brother’s holding. Niels Andersen holds two: a farm (no. 3) and a house (no. 8). A named house that sheltered several brothers’ families fits no. 8, the house, and “Niels Fredenborg” in the register is then the Niels Andersen of no. 8. The owner is Johan Kaas. The Kaas family owned Kølskegård; Anders Pedersen of Jerslev had been the Kaas family’s estate agent from 1632 to 1654, and Knud Kampmann, godfather in 1698, lived at Kølskegård. The circle is closed. The 1688 numbers do not carry into the 1813 map; the bridge is the 1844 matrikel protocol for Svennum, which records each new number’s old hartkorn. The entry whose pre-1844 hartkorn is 0 tdr 1 skp 0 fjk 1 alb is the modern plot.

Two words checked and set aside: the 1690 and 1695 entries “i Forbedringen” are a locality at Klæstrup, not Fredenborg. Source: Jerslev sogn kirkebog 1684–, burials, images 14415940–14415948 on Danish Family Search.

A history of Fredenborg

Everything below is from the records read in this study. Items marked hypothesis are inferences, not documented facts.

The points

Sources: Jerslev kirkebog 1684–; Jerslev herreds tingbøger 1631–1688 (B. Nørgaard-Pedersen’s transcription, brejl.dk); Christian V’s matrikel and the 1844 matrikel (Rigsarkivet, Arkivalieronline); Original 1 and Original 2 cadastral maps and the General Staff sheets (Klimadatastyrelsen, historiskekort.dk); Trap Danmark 5th ed.; Wiberg; C. Klitgaard, Vendsysselske Præstefamilier; the modern cadastre (Dataforsyningen) and OpenStreetMap.