The 1231 land register of King Valdemar II shows that the king owned a house or a hunting lodge on the Sønderbjerg, the island's highest point. Anholt was thus property of the crown. In 1441 the island was under the administration of Kalø Lehn, headed by Otto Nielsen Rosenkrands. Anholt belonged to the parish of Morup in the Danish province of Halland until the middle of the 16th century, when a church was built on the island itself. The island remained Danish when Denmark ceded Halland to Sweden in 1645. A story claims that a negotiator had left a glass of beer placed over the island on the map during the peace negotiations. A more plausible explanation is that Swedish forces had not conquered the fairly remote island and had little interest in it.