Stavanger

The town lived from its church all through the Middle Ages, and the Reformation fell on it like a blow. In 1537 the king confiscated the lands of the bishop and the monasteries, two years later the bishop's residence was plundered, and the shrine of St Swithun vanished; by the end of the 1530s Stavanger may have had barely a hundred inhabitants. It grew again only in the 17th century, when foreign craftsmen settled here and made the town an artistic centre in what is called the Stavanger Renaissance, and by the 1680s it held more than 1,400 people. Then the losses came together: in 1682 the bishop's see was moved to the new town of Kristiansand, in 1684 a fire destroyed about 150 of its 350 houses, and in 1686 Stavanger was stripped of its market-town rights, recovering them only four years later.