The Hansa Towns

by Helen Zimmern

With their usual astuteness they utilized wisely all periods of calm, and reckoned with the love of gain to help them in less peaceful moments. When the English made things uncomfortable for them at home, they revenged themselves upon them at Bruges or at Bergen, paralysing their commerce, and harassing their vessels, even forbidding them to enter the ports of Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. For verily in those days whosoever tried to outwit the Hansa was likely to prove the victim of his own plots. Circumstances aided the Germans, enabling them to make their power felt just when England had to betray weakness. The feeble and stormy period of Henry VI., often deposed and made prisoner, the Wars of the Roses, the long and continual hostilities waged with France, all favoured the League, and made the English submit to its demands rather than attract to themselves yet more enemies.

In no place, not even in Bergen, did the Hanseatics succeed in enjoying greater independence. Their factory was privileged, and while benefiting by English law, they were quite independent of it. Everything, therefore, was favourable to their commerce, and they were hampered by no such restrictions as weighed, not only upon other foreigners, but upon the English themselves. To give a just idea of the degree of power to which their privileges and trade had raised the League, let us cite one example. It will serve in lieu of many, and it places in full light the almost incredible ascendency which a company of merchant cities, isolated and distant from each other, had gained over a great kingdom and a proud and valiant nation.

The English Government having been unable or unwilling to repress the frequent acts of piracy which its subjects practised against members of the League, these also took to piracy, and mutual recriminations ensued. The Lübeckers in particular revenged themselves fiercely. They also wrote a letter of complaint to the English king, "a letter full of pride and audacity," says Henry IV. It then happened that the Danes, at strife with the English for other causes, joined themselves to the Hanseatics, and united they harassed the English by sea and by land. These, in their turn, took possession of the Hanseatic depôt in London, and put in prison or killed all who lodged there. The League hearing this broke off commercial connection with England, closed their ports and the entrances of the Baltic, and seized English vessels on all seas and on all coasts. The Hanseatics even landed in England itself, and pitilessly ravaged many of the maritime provinces, hanging on the masts of their ships all the men they took prisoners. This war at last grew so ruinous for the English that they applied to the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, to mediate between them and their foes. A congress was assembled at Utrecht to put an end to this dire quarrel and to assure peace upon a solid basis. The mediator and his counsellors thought it but just to accord to the English a part of what they had desired so long, namely, liberty to trade in the Baltic and with the Hanseatic ports of Dantzig and Russia. This concession greatly favoured the commerce which their merchants were ambitious to carry on, or already carried on, notwithstanding all obstacles. But for their part the Hanseatics insisted on recovering all the privileges they had lost, and on recovering them with usury. In fact, by this treaty of Utrecht Edward IV. not only reconfirmed all their ancient monopolies, but accorded to them new and important favours, proving to what extent the English were still in the power of these foreigners. Such was the effect of the fear which the League inspired in the English; such, too, was the ignorance of their Government, which, being in possession of a power not less great and, had they desired, even greater than that of their rivals, allowed strangers to deprive them of the most useful of all independent rights, that of utilizing for their own profit the resources of their own labour and their own soil.

In reading this chapter of the annals of England, it is hard to believe that we are dealing with the nation whose ships now scour all the seas, whose tonnage exceeds that of all other countries combined, which is the greatest trader of the earth, and which trades not only freely, but also in that spirit of domination with which its ancestors reproached the Hanseatics, and which they endured with so much impatience.

This treaty of Utrecht served for a long while as basis for all subsequent treaties between the Hanseatics and the English, and well or ill observed, it survived until the reign of Edward VI.

The position held by the Hanseatics in England certainly has no counterpart in the international intercourse of the Middle Ages. The only exception, perhaps, is the position of Genoa, Venice, and Pisa in the Byzantine and Latin empires.

STEELYARD WHARF, LONDON.

The chief depôt of the Hanseatics in England was in London, and was known first as the Guildhall of the Germans, then as the Easterlings' Hall, and finally, as its dimensions grew, as the Steelyard. It was situated in Thames Street, on the left bank of the river, close to Dowgate, just above London Bridge, in earlier times the only city gate that commanded the water. The whole length of this street leading to the post gate was lined with the wharves, warehouses, and dwelling-houses of the Germans. It is therefore easy to comprehend how they held, by their position alone, the key to the whole commerce of the City of London in days when goods were almost entirely transported by water-ways. As at Bergen, so here, they dominated the whole commercial situation.