Lund University is currently in the midst of 350th anniversary celebrations. A jubilee which spans two historical dates: 19 December 1666 – when the decision to establish a university in Lund was taken – and 28 January 1668 – when the University was formally inaugurated. But what happened in the intervening 13 months? Did nothing in particular occur during the whole of 1667? Of course it did! That was when all the practical preparations to get the University’s operations up and running took place. And not least: it was during 1667 – actually already in the spring of that year – that the very first students were enrolled. So this spring semester, we can actually celebrate the 350th anniversary of the first Lund University student. This begs the question: do we know anything about him?
The first page in Lund University’s oldest enrolment register, which covers the period from 1667 to 1692. Image source: Lund University archive.
The answer to the question is apparently easy to find. The University’s first enrolment register is preserved to this day in the University archive, so we can simply open it to the first page and read the entries. At the top of the first page, we find someone whose name appears in clearly printed letters: “Johannes Andrea fil. Bagerús”. But it isn’t quite that simple. One problem is that this Bagerús did not enter a date after his name, unlike all the other entries on the rest of the page. In theory, he could have added his name above all the others at a later date. And the suspicion that he might have done just that increases as one scrutinises the dates on the rest of the page. Because, despite being mainly in chronological order (from 17 April to 30 June), a couple of dates break the pattern completely: one name entered in June is between students from April and May – and one signature is dated January (unclear whether in 1667 or 1668)! There is another chronological jump further on in the register – all the earliest students from among the nobility are listed together on a special page – which suggests that the oldest part of the register may well have been compiled retroactively.
An “obscure” group
Let us nevertheless make it easy for ourselves and work on the assumption that the first name on the first page is also the first student: can we say anything about him? When the Lund alumnus and priest Paul Gabriel Ahnfelt set about being the first person to write the University’s history in Swedish in the mid-1800s, he was sceptical. At the sight of the enrolment register, he observed that “Lund’s first students are thus listed here. Johannes Baggerus, Andreæ filius, is first in this album, but neither he nor any of his 16 fellow students from this first academic year have entered their names in our chronicles. They are unfortunately all obscure […]”.
This was actually not entirely true even in Ahnfelt’s time. At least one of the names on the page, Hans Andreæ Axtrupius, was perfectly well known as a former student of the Cathedral School in Lund and later a student at the universities in Copenhagen and Greifswald before he enrolled at Lund University, and he later became the parson of St Olof church, where he died around 1695. This information was passed on by another Lund alumnus and priest, Severin Cavallin, in the fourth volume of his major history of the Lund diocese Lunds stifts herdaminne. Here he notes clearly that Axtrup “is the fifth in line among those who became students in Lund”. The volume in question was published in 1857, which was two years before Ahnfelt’s history of the University was released.
However, it was not Lund’s fifth student that we were interested in, but the first. What about him? Does he belong to the irretrievably “obscure”? Let us find out whether, in a time when reams of information are only a keystroke away on the internet, it is possible to discover what Ahnfelt could not!
But first let us look at the name itself: Johannes Andrea fil. Bagerús. We can observe that – as was customary in academic contexts at the time – it has been latinised. In everyday life, its bearer may well have answered to a very different-sounding name, and it is not so easy to say which. The first name Johannes, for example, corresponds to a whole series of possible Swedish and Danish first names: Johan, Jon, Jens, Jöns, Hans and Hannes. Andrea fil. (where the latter part is an abbreviation of filius = son) means Andersson or Andersen, and Bagerús finally, in the vernacular, could have been Bager or Bagger. The latter two were fairly common surnames in Denmark and Skåne at the time, the form with one g not least associated with Malmö. Both forms could, etymologically, originate from an ancestor who was a baker by trade, and these surnames were sometimes translated as “Pistor” – which is Latin for “baker”.
2 x vice-chancellor’s sons
This is what Lund bishop Peder Winstrup wrote in an epigram aimed at Olof Bagger, then principal at the Cathedral School in Lund, but later appointed as the first professor of theology in the newly founded University and also its first vice-chancellor. It is of course gratifying to imagine that Lund University’s first student was the son of its first vice-chancellor, and the fact is that Olof Bagger had not only one, but two sons whose name in Latin would be Johannes! In order to distinguish between them, we will refer to them hereafter as Hans and Johan respectively.
Of these brothers, the younger, Hans (1646–1693), is best known. For a brief period, he was in fact a professor without chair in theoretical philosophy at the University, but after only a few years he chose to switch back to his original nationality (he was born in Lund but at the time when Skåne was Danish) by accepting a position as “sognepræst” (parish priest) in Copenhagen. Shortly thereafter, he became bishop of Själland as well as professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen. In these capacities, he became an important reformer of the Danish church ordinance. As a young man, he had been a widely travelled student: he studied at the universities in Greifswald and Rostock as well as Copenhagen and Wittenberg – and then Lund! But when did he get there? Was it already in 1667? If we are to believe older sources, that was indeed the case: both the Svenskt biografiskt handlexikon (Swedish biographical dictionary) from 1873–76 and Martin Weibull and Elof Tegnér’s history of the University from 1868 explicitly state that Hans Bagger “was registered as a student in the newly established university in Lund in 1667”. In principle, all later biographical reference works seem to contradict this piece of information, however. Already in the 1887 edition of the Dansk biografisk leksikon (Danish Biographical Dictionary) we read that Bagger “had made plans for a long study trip, when his father called him home, so that he could be present at the inauguration of Skåne’s university in 1668. But he took his time and only returned to Lund in 1669, when he earned the degree of Master in the same year”. Indeed, a Johannes Baggerus is entered on 22 March 1669, further on in the register mentioned above. Thus Hans Bagger cannot have been our first student.
Hans Bagger – or Johannes Baggerus in Latin – bishop of Själland and student in Lund. But not the first. Image source: National Portrait Gallery (image license CC BY-NC-ND).
Nor can his elder brother Johan Bagger (1642–1722), who became the parson in Trelleborg. In 1667, he was at Uppsala University where, in early December of the same year, he publicly defended his thesis. In Lund, he was not enrolled before the end of January 1668 together with a third brother, Laurentius. Besides the fact that both the vice-chancellor’s sons known as Johannes were in the wrong locations in 1667 to have been Lund’s first student, they can also be excluded for a completely different reason. The name in the register includes as a middle name “Andreae filius”, a patronym based on the father’s first name. So the first Lund student’s father must have been called Anders (or Andreas in Latin) whereas the father of both vice-chancellor’s sons was called Olof (Olaus).
The bishop’s favourite
Is there any Anders Bagger or Bager who could be suspected of being the father of our student? As a matter of fact, there is: a man who would become the parish priest of Fridlevstad, Anders Bager or, in Latin, Andreas Bagerus Andreæ. This cleric is best known to subsequent generations for “Bager’s book”, an extremely detailed handwritten account of his own congregation, including biographical details about himself and his predecessors as parish priests (for safety’s sake, he had the book walled into the church’s chancel, where it was not found until 1837; a detail which an archivist cannot leave out). Before he became parish priest over in Blekinge, Anders Bager had been clearly connected to Lund. For a number of years, he had been an administrative assistant and secretary for bishop Peder Winstrup, and appears to have been one of the latter’s “favourites”. Of course, it is not unreasonable to surmise that such a man might have been quick to send his son to the university that was partly his mentor’s initiative and, since Bager was born in 1628, he could very well – from a purely chronological point of view – have had a son who was of an age to be enrolled at the University 39 years later, considering that students at that time were often in their mid or even low teenage years when they started their university studies.
However, the problem here is that, according to his own account in “Bager’s book”, Anders Bager’s first marriage was childless. Whether this was also the case for his second marriage is unclear but not significant in this context as wife number one, Cecilia Bagesdotter, only died in 1682. Unless the good parish priest had a son from (or outside) his first marriage which he for some reason chose to hide from posterity, then he too must be excluded as a key to the identity of the first Lund student.
An abundance of Bagers
If we continue to search, we can only observe that there is not shortage of people called Johannes Bager(us) in Sweden and Denmark in the 1600s, and that many bearers of that name did become priests – one of the most common professions among academics at the time. What is difficult is to identify one of them as the student from 1667. A Johannes Bagerus who completed a Bachelor’s degree in Theology in Copenhagen was the principal of the school in Slangerup in the late 1600s, but he was born in 1662 and thus too young to have become a student in Lund in 1667. The same is true of the Johan Bager who was a priest first in Näsinge and later Skee (both in the Swedish county of Bohuslän) in the early 1700s and died in 1721. At the time of his death, he is reported as having been a mere 47 years old, which means he would have been born around 1674.
The name also recurs in lists of old doctoral theses in various European universities. A Johannes Baggerus (with a double g) defended his thesis in 1670 in Lund on the theme of Ostracismus leviter adumbratus, &, quantum fieri potuit, cum Petalismo comparatus. This is certainly our above-mentioned Hans Bagger, however, who in the same year (together with two of his brothers, although clearly not Johan) was one of the graduands at Lund University’s very first doctoral degree conferment ceremony. On the other hand, the Johannes Bagerus (with a single g) who, probably in 1688 in Copenhagen, defended his thesis on De lege et evangelio, is harder to identify. Since academics at the time obtained their doctoral degrees very early on, the distance of just over 20 years makes it less probable that the author of the thesis would have been our elusive Lund student. The same can be said of the person with the same name who, in 1691, defended a thesis entitled De Fundamento Fidei et Salutis, also in Copenhagen. The author of one of these theses (or possibly both if they are one and the same person) could have been the very same Johannes Bagerus who lived at Valkendorf college in Copenhagen, the oldest dedicated student accommodation in the Nordic area, around 1688–1690.
If we look at the information in the University’s own archives, it does not seem that the Johannes Bagerus we are searching for left any further traces in the documentation. When the name pops up in attendance lists and minutes from meetings from the late 1660s and 1670s, for example, it is clear as a rule that it refers to one of the vice-chancellor’s sons with the same name. Perhaps the “original” Johannes tired of waiting for teaching at the University to get going properly? An important reason why so many people registered as early as 1667 was that the University aimed to become operational already in the autumn semester of the same year. This was stopped by the Government in Stockholm, however, which wanted to postpone the inauguration until the King’s namesday the following January.
I am therefore obliged to conclude, on the basis of the information I have managed to retrieve, that the Johannes Bagerus who printed his name in the University register in 1667 must still be counted among the “obscure” characters in the history of our University. But considering the large amounts of old and previously inaccessible literature and unique archive documents that are continuously being digitised and made available online nowadays, and how genealogy researchers all over the world are gradually linking their data in large international databases, I am not without hope that we will one day be able to find out more about Lund’s first student – perhaps in time for the 400th anniversary of the University in 2067?
Fredrik Tersmeden
University Archivist |
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