Sweden was on a war-footing constantly in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Taxes fell disproportionately on the peasantry, who in Finland – still under Swedish dominion – also had to accept the billeting of troops in the villages. Soldiers were allowed to take whatever they wanted from village stocks of food and fodder.
Matters were further inflamed by a dispute for the crown between the King Sigismund III and his uncle Duke Charles, later Charles IX. The dispute was both dynastic and doctrinal, the former being Catholic and the latter Lutheran. In the autumn of 1596, a delegation of farmers and peasants from Ostrobothnia petitioned Charles, who saw an opportunity to undermine the king’s loyal marshall in Finland, Klaus Fleming. Charles told them to take the law into their own hands. “There are… so many of you that you ought to be able to shake [the soldiers] off, even if armed only with fence posts and clubs.”
They were fateful words. The Club War – sometimes known as the Cudgel War – broke out soon after, on November 25 in Kyrö in South Ostrobothnia. One soldier was killed and the houses of the local gentry were looted. Some were burnt to the ground. In others, the rafters were cut through so that they collapsed on their owners when they returned. The heads of slaughtered cattle were placed in the windows – their throats gaping and grinning, it was said – to heighten the horror.
The peasants planned to march on Åbo Castle in Turku, Fleming’s headquarters. They would tear it down, they said, “not so much with their hands as with their teeth” so that not a stone of it was left. They had some successes. In one village, some of Fleming’s men were ambushed. They were taken to a nearby river, frozen over in the middle of winter. The soldiers were drowned, pushed under the ice with poles and pikes, women battering their heads with buckets and pails when they surfaced.
Thousands of peasants rose across Finland, leading to a series of pitched battles over the winter months. The rebellion was finally crushed at the battle of Santavuori at the end of February. Atrocities were widespread. In Padasjoki, 400 peasants persuaded to lay down their weapons were massacred. Elsewhere, peasants were tied in bundles of twelve and drowned beneath the ice. Some 3,000 peasants died in all – out of a total Finnish population of 200,000.
Fleming took one group of prisoners to a nearby house and had them beaten, while tried to pull out the bricks from a fireplace with their teeth. You boasted you would demolish Åbo Castle with your teeth, he told them. Yet you can’t even do this.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the November 2022 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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