Roskilde

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1370, the city of Roskilde owned 2,600 farms spread across the island of Zealand. That is the landholding of a great power, not of a country town. Today Roskilde has 53,354 residents and lies 30 km west of Copenhagen, close enough that many students commute in from the capital. Nothing in its calm streets announces the scale of that earlier wealth. This documentary asks how a settlement beside a spring came to command so much. It asks who built the churches that gave the city its weight, what brought its rise to a halt, and what a visitor can still find there, from Viking timber to a museum of rock music.

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• 2. A Spring and a King

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  The name Roskilde means 'Ro's spring', and early writers such as Saxo Grammaticus linked it to a legendary King Roar, who possibly lived there in the 6th century. Springs still rise on the slope below the old centre, and the most powerful of them is called Maglekilde.

  Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus both credit Harald Bluetooth with founding the town in the 980s. On high ground above the harbour, he is said to have raised a wooden church dedicated to the Holy Trinity, with a royal residence close by. Archaeologists have never found a trace of either building. They have found other early churches nearby, though. One is St Jørgensbjerg, and another is a wooden church uncovered beneath today's St Ib's Church.

  In 1020, King Cnut raised Roskilde to a bishopric, which gave it high standing across the whole country. Around the same time, a school was founded to train priests for the cathedral. Roskilde Cathedral School may be the oldest school in Denmark, and today it teaches more than 1,300 pupils. From the 11th century onward, the town also served as the capital of Denmark, a role it kept until 1443.

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• 3. Walls, Pirates, and Markets

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  The year 1135 brought catastrophe, when the Pomeranian duke Ratibor I destroyed the town. The citizens took defence seriously afterwards. In 1150, Sweyn Grathe had a moat dug around the city.

  A religious confraternity founded in 1151 or 1152 existed to protect Roskilde against Wendish pirates. Under the command of a man named Wetheman, it also joined the Wendish Crusade.

  Trade supplied the other pillar of strength. Roskilde was certainly enjoying trading privileges under King Eric II, who reigned from 1134 to 1137, though nobody knows when it first became a market town. On the 15th of June 1268, the Roskilde City Council granted market town status to other towns on Zealand. By then Roskilde was probably the largest and most important town in Denmark. Its mint struck coins from the 11th century until the 14th.

  The bishops of Roskilde held land across the region. From 1186, their estates included Havn on the Øresund, a place that would later become Copenhagen.

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• 4. Brick and Royal Tombs

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  Absalon, who served as Bishop of Roskilde from 1158 to 1192, is remembered as the founder of Copenhagen in the 12th century. In 1170, he had a brick church built on the very site of Harald's old church.

  Five of his successors added to the building before it was finished in 1275. Absalon's influence also inspired many other churches in the area, which made Roskilde the most important town in Zealand. By the time of the Danish Reformation in 1536, the city had 12 churches and five monasteries.

  The cathedral itself rose through the 12th and 13th centuries, while the Romanesque style absorbed Gothic ideas from northern France. It was the first Gothic cathedral in Scandinavia built of brick, and that choice of material spread across northern Europe.

  Inside lie 39 royal tombs, and Danish monarchs are still buried there. UNESCO added the cathedral to its World Heritage list in 1995. Its upper floor holds a museum on the building's history, and as a working church it hosts concerts throughout the year. Around 100,000 tourists visit it annually, down from some 200,000 visits about two decades before the source's count.

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• 5. Ships in the Fjord

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  Five 11th-century Viking ships form the centrepiece of the Viking Ship Museum, which stands alongside Roskilde Fjord. Their remains are remarkably well preserved.

  Excavators raised them in the late 1960s from the fjord, some 20 km north of the city. The ships had been scuttled in the 11th century to block a navigation channel. That sacrifice shielded the city, then the Danish capital, from attack by sea.

  The five vessels represent several distinct classes. Among them are a longship and a warship, along with smaller fishing and ferry boats. The ones on display range from 3 m to 15 m in length.

  The museum also practises experimental archaeology, testing how Vikings built ships and how well those ships sailed. Its boatyard builds full-scale vessels on site and exhibits them, keeping the old boat-building tradition alive.

  The fjord had more to give. In 1997, archaeologists found the remains of further Viking ships in the Isefjord, and the oldest of them is dated to 1030.

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• 6. After the Reformation

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  At the time of the Reformation in 1536, Roskilde had some 6,000 inhabitants, and the change of religion stopped its growth abruptly. The cathedral remained the preferred burial place of Danish monarchs, but most of the city's other religious institutions vanished.

  Three centuries of misfortune followed. The Dano-Swedish War ended with the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658. Plague struck in 1710 and 1711, and a series of fires burned through the town in 1730. By 1753, only 1,550 people remained.

  Recovery began in 1835, when Roskilde became the seat of the Assembly of the Estates of the Realm. The decisive moment came on the 26th of June 1847, when the first train arrived from Copenhagen. Roskilde Station is the oldest still operating in Denmark, and the first built of stone.

  In the 1870s and 1880s, an extended harbour drew in tobacco factories, iron foundries and machine shops. Then ships grew larger, and the harbour proved too small and Roskilde Fjord too shallow. Industry drifted away, though a spirits factory called De Danske Spritfabrikker and a slaughterhouse called Roskilde Andelssvineslagteri kept providing jobs.

  The numbers show the shift. In the 1890s, 37% of the local economy was crafts and manufacturing, and only 15% was administration and services. By 1984, industry stood at 16% and services at 57%.

  People followed the work. Roskilde had around 9,000 inhabitants by the 1900s and almost 45,000 in 1970. A dip to 40,000 in the 1980s gave way to steady growth, reaching 47,117 by 2014 and making it Denmark's tenth largest city.

  Two arrivals of the 1970s drove that growth. The Holbæk Motorway linked the city to Copenhagen, and Roskilde University opened in 1972. By 2013 the university had about 7,600 students. It sits in the Trekroner district, which takes its name from a signalman's cabin on the Roskilde-Copenhagen line.

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• 7. Old Stones

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  St Jørgensbjerg Church stands on a little hill northwest of the old town and overlooks the fjord. Its nave and chancel, in travertine, date from about 1080, which makes it Denmark's oldest preserved stone building. Its carved pulpit is from 1616.

  St Ib's, built of travertine around 1100, sits below the cathedral plateau near the harbour. Fragments of its frescoes survive on the rear wall, and it is no longer a functioning church.

  The Old Church of Our Lady dates to the 11th century and is the only surviving travertine basilica in Denmark. Its altarpiece and pulpit, carved in the 1620s, came from the Roskilde workshop of Brix Michgell. The word 'Old' entered its name in 1907, when a new Church of Our Lady was built south of the city.

  Of the 13th-century Sankt Laurentii Church, only a tower remains, built at the start of the 16th century. It now forms part of the former town hall on Stændertorvet and holds a museum of archaeological finds from 1998.

  The mid-13th-century St Catherine's Priory once belonged to Dominican friars. After the Reformation dissolved it, a private manor called Sortebrødregaard went up on the site in 1565. In 1699, the manor became a convent for women of high rank, the first of its kind in Lutheran Denmark. It now displays 150 paintings from the 16th to 18th centuries.

  Roskilde Palace was built from 1733 to 1736 on the site of the bishops' former residence. During the English siege of Copenhagen in 1807, it served as headquarters for General Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. Today it houses the Museum of Contemporary Art.

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• 8. Rock, Racing, and Jars

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  The Roskilde Festival has taken place every year since 1971 on fairgrounds south of the city centre. It draws around 80,000 people annually and offers rock, metal, hip-hop, electronica, dance and world music. All of its profits go to charities.

  A different kind of noise filled the town from 1955, when the Roskilde Ring was built in an abandoned gravel quarry. The track began at just 670 metres, and in 1957 it was extended to 1.38 km. It had no straight, and every corner was banked. The Danish Grand Prix for Formula Two cars ran there each year from 1960 to 1968. The last meeting took place on the 22nd of September 1968, and the site is now a park.

  Outside the main railway station, three Roskilde Jars stand in a shallow basin of water. Each is 5 m tall, and together they weigh about 24 tons. The abstract sculptor Peter Brandes, born in 1944, made them. Elsebeth Stryhn of the local meat paste firm Stryhns Leverpostej commissioned them, and they were given to the city in 1998 for its 1,000th anniversary.

  On the 29th of April 2016, Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark, opened Ragnarock, a museum of pop, rock and youth culture. The Dutch firm MVRDV and the Danish firm COBE Architects designed the 3,100 square-metre building, which follows rock music from the 1950s to the present. It stands in the Musicon quarter, a 25 ha site where a cement factory once stood, beside the festival fairgrounds. The city plans to bring creative companies and housing for young people to the district.

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