The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  In the years before the Black Death food supplies were under increasing pressure as Europe’s population grew, peaking by about 1315. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries English wheat and barley were regularly exported to Bergen. King Sverre of Norway gave a speech in Bergen in 1186 in which he said: ‘We thank all Englishmen because they came here, those who brought wheat and honey, flour and cloth. And we further thank those who have brought linen and flax, wax and kettles.’ At the same time he thanked everyone who had come from all the north Atlantic islands, such as the Faroes and Orkney, ‘who have brought here to this country such things as we cannot do without and which are of great use to this country’. He was much less positive about the Germans: ‘the German men who have come here in great numbers and in great boats wish to take away butter and codfish and their export is of great ruin to the country.’ The reason the king resented this German intrusion was not just that they grabbed hold of the best that Norway could offer, but that they brought dangerous produce in the holds of their ships: wine. The people of Bergen have taken to drink; ‘many have lost their lives, some their limbs, some are damaged for their entire life, others have suffered disgrace, have been wounded or beaten, and all this comes from too much drink.’31 It is difficult to know how seriously to take a colourful speech that was recorded in an Icelandic saga (even though the author knew the king personally), but there is an interesting hint here that the German network extended down to the vineyards of central Germany; Cologne and its neighbours would have ferried the wine downriver, where it would have been pumped into the North Sea networks of the early Hansa.

  However, England too began to feel the pressure of rising population, and there was greater reluctance to export grain across the North Sea when supplies at home were frequently stretched to the limit. The Norwegian kings became more generous to their German visitors as they began to see how essential their presence had become. Baltic rye was turning into black gold. In 1278 King Magnus assured the Germans – represented by two merchants of where else but Lübeck – that they were welcome to come to Bergen, and encouraged them to buy hides and butter. The German merchants were brought under the protection of the crown; the king insisted that ‘the Lübeck citizens are shown all possible favour and goodwill’.32 Even so, the Hansa merchants were not given an entirely free hand. By 1295, alongside further guarantees of immunity, they were forbidden from travelling north of Bergen into the land where Norwegian traders obtained their wares, and they were forbidden from exporting fish during part of the year unless they had carried grain of similar value to Bergen: ‘such foreigners as sit here during the winter and do not bring flour, malt or rye, shall purchase neither butter, furs nor dried fish between the Cross Masses’ (14 September to 30 May).33

  By 1300 the German community in Bergen consisted not just of those who arrived by sea each spring, but the ‘winter-sitters’, and alongside them there were shoemakers and other German craftsmen who had been settling in the town since at least 1250. By 1300 the Hansa merchants in Bergen had learned how important it was to work together in the face of the combination of suspicion and welcome that they faced in their dealings with the kings of Norway. Within Bergen, a corporate identity emerged, and this was recognized by the crown: in 1343, for the first time, the Hanseatic traders were described as ‘the merchants of the Hansa of the Germans’ (mercatores de Hansa theotonicorum). What came into being over the next few years (certainly before 1365) is known as the Kontor, or ‘Counter’, a tightly controlled organization that negotiated for and managed the lives of the German merchants trading through Bergen. It was, in effect, a body of Lübeckers, operating under the commercial law of Lübeck, though there were also members from Hamburg, Bremen and elsewhere: ‘the counter was a branch office of Lübeck’, in effect an extra-territorial enclave.34 The fact that the Germans lived under their own law is just one sign of their separation from the other inhabitants of Bergen, but after the middle of the fourteenth century the great majority of Hansa merchants lived in Bryggen, in the closely packed wooden houses right by the harbour that formed a German enclave.35

  Such enclaves were a common feature of the medieval trading world (and probably provided a model for Jewish ghettos); the example of the Peterhof in Novgorod has already been encountered, and that of the Steelyard in London will be examined shortly. They enabled rulers to keep an eye on merchant communities; but they also provided an opportunity for the mother city of the merchants, in this case Lübeck, to set up an administration, ensuring that the running costs of the community were covered by internal taxes, and offering justice according to the legal system with which the members were familiar. Above all, the members of these communities could form a united front whenever they believed their interests were being threatened by the local ruler, as often happened in Bergen.36 In the Mediterranean, these enclaves were usually created by order of kings and sultans, but the creation of the Hansa enclave in Bergen was a gradual process, as the German merchants acquired more and more houses within the wharfside area; and for at least a hundred years there were houses that remained in Norwegian ownership within the area. Besides, the plots of land on which the German warehouses stood were rented from local nobles or from the Church.37

  The Bryggen area was a tight fit; around 1400 there were about 3,000 Germans in a city of 14,000 inhabitants. Many were quite young apprentices and journeymen who faced a tough life during the seven to ten years that carried them up a strict hierarchy from the modest status of Stubenjunge to the honourable status of Meister. Living conditions were strictly controlled, and for part of the year apprentices were largely confined to the house where they resided. They were male-only settlements, and the apprentices lived in narrow dormitories, working a twelve-hour day, excluding mealtimes. Many crept out at night, finding their way to the red-light district that lay just behind the Hansa quarter; but to do so meant avoiding massive guard dogs that were placed around the outer edges of the Bryggen houses, to deter not just intruders but escapees. Fear of liaisons with Norwegian women stemmed from the notion that people living in the Kontor would give away to local wives or to whores all the trade secrets they had learned: they might ‘tell the native woman under the influence of her charm, as well as that of liquor, things she had best not know’. On the other hand, the fine for being found with a ‘loose woman’ was a keg of beer – the woman suffered much worse, by being thrown into the harbour. Journeymen were subjected to brutal initiation rituals, which might include such wholesome entertainment as being roasted by a fire while suspended in a chimney, being half drowned in the harbour and being ceremonially flogged, though a little mercy was shown by making sure that they were already drunk.38 These, admittedly, are negative images of life in the community, and back home in Lübeck there was, by the mid-sixteenth century, some concern that the initiation rituals were now out of control. Allowing for feast days and periods when trade was slack, and allowing for the strong sense of community that was created within the Hansa community, life in the Kontor can best be described as harsh and hard, but not insufferable. The Kontor was a place where German merchants learned the art of honest trade, and where they were made fully conscious of the fact that they were Hanseatics (mainly Lübeckers) first, and inhabitants of Bergen second.

  24

  The English Challenge

  I

  In the fifteenth century, two challenges to the ascendancy of the Hansa emerged, one from within the area where some Hansa towns already existed, the Netherlands, and one from a kingdom that had already become one of their favourite trading destinations in the North Sea, England. The Hansa monopoly, such as it was, was being slowly broken, even though it had already suffered from strains when Cologne or Danzig challenged Lübeck, or when the Vitalienbrüder harassed shipping in the Baltic and the North Sea. In order to understand the new challenges, it is best to stay for the moment with the Hansa, and to look at the bases that they created in England, not just in London but in Lynn, Boston, Hull and Ravenser,
a port near Hull that long ago was washed away by the waves.

  London, by far the largest city in England, was, not surprisingly, their headquarters. There, they operated from their Kontor next to the Thames at what was known as the Stahlhof, or ‘Steelyard’. The name seems to be a corruption of the term Stapelhof, ‘courtyard for trading staple goods’, and has nothing to do with steel. The site of the German Kontor in London has been covered over by Cannon Street Railway Station, constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century; the builders swept away the entire Steelyard, down to its foundations. Very little was found during excavations in 1987 (even the pottery turned out mainly to be English). However, some plans and descriptions survive from the sixteenth century. There were three gateways, and there was a great hall; there were warehouses and sleeping quarters, as well as administrative offices. Nonetheless, the Steelyard was not a particularly imposing place, compared to the courtyards and quadrangles that existed elsewhere in London, such as the Inns of Court, by now an enclave for lawyers. Rather, the Steelyard was a packed space, a business quarter where hardly an inch of space was wasted. The Hansards wanted privileges, not fine buildings.

  As in Bergen, the London Kontor formed a privileged enclave, enjoying both royal protection and self-government, and, like the settlement in Bergen, it took time to coalesce. In London, recognition of the special status of the German merchants did not take place as a result of the efforts of the Lübeckers, but through the activities of merchants first of Cologne and then of Gotland; in the thirteenth century the English royal administration talked of several hanses, applying the term to groups of Flemings, as well as to those who would eventually become the Hansards. England was a highly desirable market for both Flemish and German traders. The country supplied excellent wool, which was hungrily consumed by the looms of the Flemish cities, while the English had long ago developed a taste for Rhineland wines. Yet wine was by no means the most important item to cross the North Sea from Germany. So strong was demand for English produce that silver flooded into the kingdom, which was able to maintain a high-quality silver currency in the thirteenth century while other parts of Europe constantly devalued their silver coinage by adding base metals. No other European kingdom was as rich in silver and of no other kingdom can it be said that the silver content of its coinage remained stable all the way from the ninth century to 1250. By 1200 the influx of silver, mainly from the rich mines that had been opened up in Germany, led to quite serious price inflation that affected basic commodities such as foodstuffs.1 ‘Sterling silver’, today set at a standard of 925‰, has a long history. It comes as little surprise that the one place in northern Europe to match the quality of English coinage was the mint of Cologne, for this was the distribution centre from which English goods fanned out across the Continent; even the availability of local silver supplies could not prevent a serious decline in the quality of the coinage elsewhere in Germany.

  The English kings rather took the silver imports for granted, and when they extended their favours to the merchants of Cologne it was in recognition of their accomplishments as dealers in good wines. By the middle of the twelfth century, the men of Cologne lay under the protection of the English Crown, and they were assured of the right to sell their wine on the same terms as French wine merchants; they already possessed a domus, or operations centre, later described as their gildhalla, ‘guildhall’, implying that this was not a random group of visitors but an organized body of men; exactly where this guildhall lay is not clear. Circumstances outside their control brought new advantages to the German merchants in London. King Richard I had been imprisoned by the German emperor, Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, while he was trying to make his way home after the Third Crusade failed to recover Jerusalem. One of the German princes who was willing to give him help was the archbishop of Cologne. The grateful king of England therefore extended the privileges of the Cologne merchants in 1194, so that they would henceforth be free of taxes and tribute. They could operate their own internal customs system among themselves, which would be important if the costs of running their guildhall were to be met. Admittedly, the attitude of later kings to this generous grant wavered, but the political motives never went away: King John also relied on an alliance with the archbishop of Cologne, who supported the same claimant to the German throne after the death of Emperor Henry as did John (with disastrous consequences for the English king). So even the money-grubbing King John was minded to let the Cologne merchants retain their special privileges. These Cologne merchants possessed their own seagoing ships, and they also hired Flemish vessels, acting as intermediaries in the wool trade linking England to the Flemish cloth towns.2

  Gradually, the German community broadened its character, as visitors arrived from Visby, Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg; they came not just to London but to accessible places on the east coast, such as Lynn and Boston, where Lübeckers could be found buying wool in 1271.3 When Emperor Frederick II gave Lübeck its special privileges in 1226, he insisted that its merchants trading in England should be exempt from taxes imposed on them by the merchants of Cologne, and over the next few years King Henry III, who was related by marriage to the German emperor, also took the Lübeckers under his protection.4 The Cologne merchants took umbrage at the presence of these rivals, which serves as a reminder that family disputes often disrupted Hansa brotherhood. These groups were granted their own corporations, or Hansas, so that during the thirteenth century there was not one consolidated group of Hanseatic merchants, but several sub-Hansas vying for royal favour. The citizens of London complained that the Germans had greater freedoms in their own city than they did.

  Then, when King Edward I attempted to rationalize all the past grants to merchants visiting his kingdom, the Hansa gave him vocal support; in 1303 he issued the Carta Mercatoria, legislation that levied higher taxes on foreign than on native merchants, but the Germans saw it as a relatively good deal; they wanted guarantees, they wanted stability, and they understood by now that it was more important to work together than to feed the pride of Cologne, Lübeck and other rivals. Unfortunately that was by no means the end of the story, as the next king, the unfortunate Edward II, suspended his father’s law in 1311. The Hansards insisted on their exemptions, and Edward II wanted as much money as he could squeeze out of his subjects for wars in Scotland. Nonetheless, in bits and pieces, and subject to all sorts of temporary reversals, by the middle of the fourteenth century they had clawed back many of the rights they had obtained in 1303.5

  It was not all plain sailing thereafter. Once Edward III had taken charge of his kingdom, he launched vastly ambitious wars in France that frequently disrupted movement across the sea. Flanders might be cut off; ships might be pounced upon by rival navies. The English Channel and the North Sea became important, and dangerous, theatres of war.6 Fortunately for the merchants, he needed to borrow funds and, having drained the great Florentine banks of capital in the 1340s, he turned to German bankers, pawning his Crown Jewels; and this meant that he had to be polite to merchants from that part of the world (interestingly, his creditors included Jewish bankers, excluded from England for the past half-century). There were ugly moments when Germans were accused of piracy against ships bearing English wool across the North Sea, leading to exemplary confiscations of German property in the kingdom. The relationship between the Hansa and the English Crown was not, then, a smooth one, but on balance the two sides needed one another. Not just silver but furs, wax and stockfish were in high demand. By 1400 the English had begun to realize how desirable Baltic herrings were; ships were reaching Hull that carried nothing but herrings, loaded at the expense of English importers. In the past, many of these goods had been supplied by Norwegians, but the Germans increasingly muscled in on this business: by 1300 they had already acquired a commanding position at Bergen. And much the same was true of Flanders, as Hansa cogs plied back and forth between the Flemish coast and England – the Flemings tending to concentrate more on producing cloth.

  I
n the fifteenth century the entire space between England and the eastern Baltic was abuzz with trade. Ties were built to Danzig and the towns along the coast of Prussia (which then included Danzig), and direct contact between eastern England and the further reaches of the Baltic became common. Nor did this simply consist of visits by enterprising citizens of Danzig or Elbing to England, for a constant complaint of the Prussians was that their towns were being invaded by English cloth merchants.7 This reflected an important change in the character of English trade at the end of the Middle Ages. Although England had always exported some finished cloth of very high quality, its real speciality in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been the export of raw wool, leaving others, in Flanders and elsewhere, to turn it into the fine woollens for which northern Europe was famous, goods that might find their way to Morocco and Egypt. Trade wars with Flanders during the early fourteenth century occasionally blocked the import of Flemish cloth, and even after the trade wars were at an end high tariffs made the import of this cloth unattractive. This created a strong incentive to manufacture cloth at home and not to rely on imports. Flemings were encouraged to come and settle, importing the secrets of Flemish cloth-making; the wealthy towns of East Anglia became home to many Flemish weavers. By the late fourteenth century enterprising Englishmen had, then, stimulated their own cloth industry into new life, and English woollen cloth rather than unprocessed wool became the export of choice. England was transforming itself from a country that concentrated on the export of raw materials into one that concentrated on the export of finished goods – a process of what might loosely be termed proto-industrialization.8