Møllediget i Sorø

Resumé

The Mill Dam in Sorø
By Aage P. Ravnsgaard

In 1161 a Cistercian monastery was founded in the midst of Zealand on the ruins of an only twenty-yearold Benedictine monastery. The founder was a young man named Absalon, who belonged to one of the most influential families in Denmark. He was sworn brother to the Danish king and had just returned from Paris, where he had studied for ten years. A few years later he became a bishop and later an archbishop, and is now regarded as the founder of Copenhagen.
His idea was that the abbey church should serve as a chapel for himself and his family. The layout for a Cistercian monastery was very standardized and in general involved running water as a source of energy for the different workshops and for washing away waste. In order to establish such a stream it was necessary to dig a channel between the two neighbouring lakes Sorø Sø and Tuelsø, which were only two kilometres apart, and to raise the water level in Sorø Sø a couple of metres. Because of disputes with neighbours the whole channel project was delayed 40 years but finally succeeded around 1200. The monastery functioned until the Reformation in 1536 and served for about another fifty years as a retirement home for all Danish monks. After 1586 the monastery was transformed into a boarding school and academy which is still in function, but has been rebuilt several times. For most of the stretch outside the monastery wall the channel is still visible, but not so inside the wall. Only archaeological excavations can reveal the course and construction of the channel inside the monastery wall, but such excavations have only been carried out for a section of the channel fifty years ago, and what is worse, the results have neither been evaluated nor published in any scholarly journal. However, the course of the channel has recently been struck by chance twice when the sewage system was being renovated. The topology meant that it was not easy to plan and construct the channel, since the monks were left with few choices when the work had to be curtailed. In particular, there was very little space for the gradient of the channel, which was as little as 3 cm per 100 m, and comparable to what the Romans could master. Furthermore, the volume of water was insufficient during the summer, and this had implications for the design of the water mill close to the inlet of the channel. This paper seeks to combine the latest findings with older source material in order to construct an overall picture of how the channel was laid out and constructed. And a proposal is put forward for the design of the water mill, based on the excavated remains. However, allowance must be made for the fact that the author is by no means an archaeologist, but has an engineering approach to the subject.