Bergen to restore the Norwegian estate to Tycho), issued an "Arrangement and rule for Tycho Brahe and the inhabitants at Hveen," which both parties were ordered to obey and follow.[1] In this document the amount of labour to be furnished by each farm was fixed at two days a week, from sunrise to sunset, and rules were laid down about various other matters; thus a tenant who did not keep his dikes and fences in order was to pay a fine in money to the landlord and a barrel of beer to the townsmen; nobody was to gather nuts or cut wood without leave from Tycho Brahe or his steward; a petty sessions court was to be held every second Wednesday,[2] and appeals were to be heard in Scania in future, instead of in Seeland.[3] The peasants were not to consider their holdings as their own property, as they had no legal authority for doing so, but in future, when any farmer died, his holding was to be treated as any other farm on a Crown estate.
If the buildings and other works at Hveen required much manual labour, the scientific researches for the sake of which they were erected required a great deal of work to be done by practised observers and computers, and these Tycho readily found in the young men who soon began to flock to Hveen in order to enjoy the privilege of studying under his guidance. The first to arrive seems to have been Peder Jakobsen Flemlöse, born about 1554 in a village called Flemlöse, in the island of Fyen (Funen). He had already, in 1574, published a Latin poem on the solar eclipse of that year, in which he showed that though eclipses have a perfectly natural cause, they are signs of the anger of God; but the eclipse of 1574 he believed to mean that the second coming of Christ was soon to take place. This
