Hamar

Hamar lived from its bishop and little else, and after the Black Death of 1349 it declined with the church that fed it, never to recover. The Reformation finished it as a church town. In 1537 the Danish commander Truid Ulfstand came to Hamar and carried off Mogens Lauritssøn, the last Catholic bishop in Norway, to captivity in Denmark; the cathedral and the bishop's castle passed to the crown as Hamarhus. Thirty years later, in the Northern Seven Years' War, Swedish soldiers under Johan Siggeson wrecked both. In 1587, after the burghers of Oslo complained of its competition, a royal ordinance closed Hamar's market, and the town lost its rights altogether. Its land went to the farm of Storhamar, and the cathedral ruins were left standing among the fields.