Just as Flemish cloth had been sent deep into the Baltic and all the way to the Mediterranean, English cloth could increasingly be found in places very far from the wool towns of East Anglia and the Cotswolds. The presence of growing numbers of Englishmen in Prussia is not as surprising as it may seem; when things were working well, Englishmen from Lynn and Boston rented Hanseatic ships and carried the cloth of England all the way to Danzig and beyond. Richard Schottun from Lynn was the sort of character who gave English merchants a bad name in Danzig. He boasted about ignoring the tax regulations, and he brought back poor-quality timber known as wrak et wrak-wrak, probably taken from rotting hulks and driftwood, while pretending that he only obtained his timber from Danzig itself. He and three other Englishmen bought a ship, the hulk Krystoffer, in Danzig, but he overextended himself, for he then found himself being pursued for debts there. Even so, his links with Danzig lasted a good ten years, so his reputation was not bad enough to force him out of the city. By 1422 fifty-five English merchants were frequenting the port of Danzig, to judge from existing records. Ordinary folk in England built marriage ties as far away as Prussia; the son of the celebrated English mystic Margery Kempe married a woman from Danzig, and Margery herself visited the city.9
Prussia was also a favourite destination for English crusaders, and joining the Teutonic Knights on one of their sprees into pagan territory was regarded as good military entertainment, whether or not it was also good for the soul. Among the participants was Henry, earl of Derby, who after his return would seize the English throne from the increasingly tyrannical Richard II; he arrived in Stettin (Szczecin) with up to 150 servants and recruits, so keeping him supplied was big business for those who carried him over the waves. Indeed, during the 1420s the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order remained friendly to the English, even when the Prussian members of the Hansa sternly demanded their arrest in return for alleged insults against German merchants in England.10 Relations between the Hansards and the Teutonic Order had plummeted following the massive defeat of the Knights at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410, when the Knights paid for their folly in turning against what was now, officially at any rate, a Catholic kingdom embracing Christian Poland and newly converted Lithuania. A three-cornered contest for power was taking place between the king of Poland–Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights and the Prussian members of the Hanseatic League. It is hardly surprising that outsiders sometimes found themselves caught up in rivalries that they had no part in creating.11
Between 1469 and 1474 relations deteriorated to the point where England and the Hansa found themselves at war with one another, although predictably Cologne was opposed to action, and the warmongers were Lübeck and Danzig, both of which had suffered from English piracy. The problem was English intrusion into the Baltic, which was of little interest to Hansa cities more connected to the North Sea.12 Underlying all this is a simple fact: there was a greater will for peace and the restoration of good relations than for conflict, and if that involved compromise over the rights of access of the English to the Baltic, it would simply have to be accepted. Once peace was signed between the Hansa and the English Crown in Utrecht in 1474, a decade of peace followed. In reality, though, the English had found a place for themselves on the sea, and were now impossible to shift; the men of Bristol, in particular, had become familiar figures who sailed with impunity across broad swathes of the North Sea and the Atlantic.13 By the 1490s it was obvious that the great age of German trade with England had come to an end. Not just the economic climate was difficult: the complications of early Tudor politics made merchants from the Holy Roman Empire, the subjects of Henry VIII’s rival Charles V, wonder whether they were still welcome on English shores.14
Something remained, all the same. The Steelyard, briefly confiscated, was restored to the Hansards in 1474, and was only closed down by Queen Elizabeth I in 1598. Indeed, the Utrecht treaty for the first time assigned full ownership of the site in London to the Hansa, along with property at Lynn and Boston. The management of the new Steelyard at Lynn was entrusted to the merchants of Danzig, because, the Hansa Diet insisted, ‘your merchants frequent Lynn more than any other Hanseatic merchants, and therefore this matter is of more concern to you than anyone else’.15 The building the merchants received still stands, though it was converted into dreary local government offices. Still, enough of its wooden framework survives outside, and enough of its beams inside, to justify its claim to be the only Hanseatic structure still in existence in England. The building originally contained a kitchen, hall and courtyard, and the property was formed out of seven houses joined together. The great advantage of using Lynn was that it gave access to the riches of East Anglia, which, as has been seen, was drawing great wealth from the production of woollen cloth. The great wool churches of Lavenham and Long Melford stand testimony to the prosperity of the region, and this prosperity depended in significant degree on the sea trade out of the east of England.
II
Wool attracted many besides the Hansards to medieval England. The opening of a sea route from the Mediterranean to the North Sea at the end of the thirteenth century was closely linked to the surge in demand for fine wool in Italy. Florence emerged from relative obscurity during the thirteenth century, making itself famous through the quality of its cloth, and then through its ambitious decision to launch a gold coinage in 1252. As the cloth industry developed, moving from the finishing of other people’s cloth (the cleaning and dyeing of cloth from Flanders and France), to the manufacture of cloth from raw wool, the Florentines understood that they could only rival the high-quality output of Flanders by obtaining the very best wool, even if that meant looking all the way towards England. They lacked a fleet of their own; but by 1277 Genoese ships had learned how to pass out through the dangerous waters of the Strait of Gibraltar and sail on towards Flanders. From 1281 onwards Majorcan as well as Genoese ships began to reach London from the Mediterranean, breaking open a route that, on and off, would be maintained by the Genoese, and later by the Venetians, the Catalans and the Florentines themselves, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The ships that stood in the Port of London in 1281 are known to have been loaded with wool before they departed. This new route enabled much greater quantities of English wool, or, for ships sailing from the outports of Bruges, many more bolts of fine cloth, to be carried into the Mediterranean; large galleys sent from Venice and Pisa, the port of Florence, in the fifteenth century brought sugar, spices, fine ceramics and exotic silks to northern Europe, including goods that were collected in the ports of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, or in the outports of Seville, which had become the lynchpin linking the trade of the Mediterranean to that of the Atlantic. Italian bankers, from Lucca, Florence and elsewhere, established themselves in England late in the thirteenth century, and until a great crash occurred in the 1340s – partly the result of the bad debts of the English king incurred during his wars against the French – the Italians acquired considerable leverage at the English court.16
London was one target of the Italians; but it made more sense for those who also wished to visit Flanders to stop somewhere on the south coast instead, and this stimulated the development of a town that already had a history of close contact with France (commemorated in its ‘French Street’): Southampton.17 By comparison with the cities of the Mediterranean, or with the greater Hansa cities, Southampton was tiny: its population stood at around 2,500 in 1300, and in the wake of the Black Death it had dropped to a mere 1,600 in 1377.18 Just at this point a distinguished Genoese emissary, Janus Imperiale, came to the court of Edward III with the proposal that Southampton should be declared a staple port, the only point of access for foreign merchants seeking wool. The Genoese clearly hoped to corner the market, but Janus’s body was found outside the front door of his lodgings in London on the night of 26 August 1379. He had been assassinated by his English rivals. For the king had already established Calais, which he had brought under English rule, as the staple port for wool expor
ts, and his assassins could see that the Genoese project would undermine their own ascendancy.19 However, Italians continued to flock to Southampton in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Fifty to a hundred Italians took up residence in the town, though they lacked a quarter reserved for their use. Sometimes, as in the case of the Florentine agent Christopher Ambrose (Cristoforo Ambruogi), the Italians decided that their future lay in the colder climes of England, and they applied for English citizenship, though there was also a middle status, giving them the right of abode as ‘denizens’, that suited a great many. Ambrose even became mayor of Southampton.20
London hosted Spaniards as well as Italians. Catalans arrived on galleys from Barcelona and Majorca, but pirate attacks often discouraged them.21 Most of the Iberian visitors came from the northern coast of Spain, bringing iron, woad and leather, rather than the sugar, ceramics and silk collected by the Italian galleys as they passed the kingdom of Granada.22 Cantabrians, Galicians and Basques from Atlantic Spain plied the waters around Iberia, also penetrating into the Mediterranean; and they worked their way up the western flank of France towards Bourgneuf, Normandy and Bruges.23 Spaniards such as Andrés Pérez de Castrogeríz arrived in London from Burgos as early as 1270, and he also traded in Gascony, which lay under English rule and was the major source of wine for English markets; he had many successors. The reward for their hard work came in the form of royal privileges that offered tax exemptions in London and Southampton – the English kings wanted them to keep coming.24 In the early fifteenth century a doggerel poet, the author of the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, a tract in verse that extolls the foreign trade of England, wrote that:
Bene fygues, raysyns, wyne, bastarde and dates,
And lycorys, Syvyle oyle and also grayne,
Whyte Castell sope and wax is not in vayne,
and went on to praise the iron, saffron and mercury that Spain also offered (grayne does not mean wheat but grana, a red dye made from crushed insects, and a Spanish speciality).25
The most prominent communities of foreign businessmen in London were the Genoese and the Germans, but the fifteenth-century city was quite cosmopolitan. From faraway Dubrovnik, Ragusan merchants arrived on their own ships or those of the Venetians, bringing sweet Malmsey wines from Greece. One particularly enterprising Ragusan was Ivan Manević, who became a naturalized subject of the Crown and a landowner, and also farmed the taxes due to the Crown from the textile workshops of a large area of southern England. By the early sixteenth century, the Ragusans became the masters of the English cloth trade towards the eastern Mediterranean, benefiting from their cosy relationship with the Ottoman court in Constantinople.26 The impression all this might give is that the English played a rather passive role, welcoming the Hansards, the Genoese and the Spaniards (up to a point), while not themselves being very active on the water. If that was ever true, it was certainly not the case in the late Middle Ages, as the examples of Winchelsea and Bristol clearly show.
III
Winchelsea was one of the ‘Cinque Ports’ that had been entrusted with the defence of the eastern end of the English Channel since the eleventh century. Now some way inland, Winchelsea stood alongside an irregularly shaped, shifting, marshy coastline. In the 1280s the town was moved at royal command to a higher site away from the encroaching waves, which meant that it could still function as a port. The new town, with its square street pattern, was modelled on the bastide towns, defensive positions built by the English and the French in the contested lands of south-western France, with which King Edward I was very familiar.27 Its inhabitants and those of Rye, nearby, made use of relatively peaceful times to launch raids on shipping in the English Channel, so that piracy as well as trade created the wealthy community that emerged on the new site. William Longe was a Member of Parliament early in the fifteenth century; he was also one of the Rye officials appointed to keep an eye out for pirates by patrolling the Channel, and yet he himself turned pirate, attacking Florentine and Flemish ships. The courts could not ignore this, and Longe was sent to prison for a while, but his popularity only grew, and he was re-elected to the House of Commons time and again.28 As ever, the borderline between piracy and officially sanctioned warfare was easily crossed.
Outrages were committed on both sides. In 1349 a surprise attack by a Castilian admiral, who had seized English ships loaded with wine off Gascony, created consternation in England; the time for revenge came a year later when a Castilian convoy laden with Spanish wool passed through the Channel on its way to Flanders. This was understood in England to mean that the Castilians were cocking a snook at the English and their commanding position in the wool trade towards Flanders. Led into the fray by a very large cog from Winchelsea, the Thomas, the English pounced on the Castilian fleet as it returned from Flanders. The battle of Winchelsea, as it is known, though ships from Sandwich, Rye and elsewhere also took part, was a resounding victory for the English, even though the Castilian ships were larger than the English ones. This was possibly the first naval battle in the west in which cannon were used. The battle was won, but, to use the old cliché, the war was not: the English Channel remained an unsafe area, and to avoid capture by the French or their Castilian allies the English had to sail in convoy. This was not enough to protect the town, though. In 1380 Winchelsea was sacked by Castilian raiders.29
No doubt the stone-lined cellars that still exist in Winchelsea were often used to store the proceeds of piracy; but this was not a nest of pirates – there was plenty of licit trade. The citizens of Winchelsea were wine merchants; in 1303–4 twelve ships from Winchelsea went to Bordeaux, where they collected 1,575 tuns of wine, very roughly 4,000 gallons. Winchelsea had the most successful wine trade of any of the towns along this coast, and its shrunken state today makes it hard to imagine the thriving, well-connected port that it once was.30 But the town that was best placed to handle the traffic in wine had a much brighter future: it was Bristol, soon to become the third greatest city in the English realm.
IV
Bristol, originally Brig-stowe, ‘the place of the bridge’, is one of the most unusual harbours in the world. It lies beyond the gorges of the River Avon, which narrow where the Avon meets the majestic River Severn. When the tide is in, the water level rises alarmingly, sometimes by as much as twelve metres, or forty feet; ships bound for Bristol would await the high tide and be swept up towards the city. At low tide, the muddy bottom of the harbour was exposed, and ships would balance their keels on the soft ground.31 Bristol lay in a fertile part of England, and in the early days its trade with Wales and Ireland brought the town some wealth; but even in the fourteenth century ships trading with Ireland remained small, reflecting the relatively low volume of business (their capacity was generally around twenty to thirty tons). As the Irish linen industry took off at the end of the Middle Ages, opportunities along this route did improve; but the ships themselves were mainly Irish-owned, and the real prosperity of Bristol was the result of contacts much further afield.32 One reason for the port’s increase in trade was the rise of the English cloth industry, for when it came to the manufacture of fine cloth, the Cotswold villages east of Bristol were keen rivals to the wool towns of East Anglia, while objects carved in alabaster, the waxy stone out of which the English sculpted highly decorated altarpieces, were brought down from Coventry and sent abroad from Bristol. Bristol dealers also kept up their links with Southampton, so that even when they were not sending their cloth through the home port, they despatched it across Salisbury plain towards Italian galleys waiting there, while Bristol cloth was also carried on the roads to London, to be sold to Hansa merchants, who were said to offer better terms than their English counterparts.33
The real reason for Bristol’s success, however, lay with the wine trade.34 This success was built on political as well as commercial links: the acquisition of English rights in Gascony following the marriage of King Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century. Even then, the reputation of Gascony for
wine took time to be established. By the end of the thirteenth century, encouraged by the businessmen of Bordeaux, the flat lands of the Bordelais were given over almost entirely to vineyards. This was made possible not just because the soil was suitable for wine production, but because of the ease with which wine could be transported down the little tributaries of the Gironde towards Bordeaux. The merchants of Bordeaux carved out a monopoly for themselves, ensuring that they could tax the wine to their heart’s content as it passed through the city. Since the administration of Gascony was autonomous, despite English rule, the English merchants had to put up with these taxes despite their objections, which reached the House of Commons in 1444; these objections were a little exaggerated, since English merchants did not pay any dues on the goods they imported into Gascony, and the great majority of the ships that plied back and forth between England and Bordeaux were English. At the start of the fifteenth century, something like 200 ships each year could be expected to set out from Bordeaux loaded with wine, arriving in autumn or early spring and leaving in December or March; the voyage normally took about ten days.35
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