HANOVER, a borough of York county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 36 m. S. by W. of Harrisburg, and 6 m. from the S. border of the state. Pop. (1890) 3746; (1900) 5302, (133 foreign-born); (1910) 7057. It is served by the Northern Central and the Western Maryland railways. The borough is built on nearly level ground in the fertile valley of the Conewago, at the point of intersection of the turnpike roads leading to Baltimore, Carlisle, York and Frederick, from which places the principal streets—sections of these roads—are named. Among its manufactures are foundry and machine-shop products, flour, silk, waggons, shoes, gloves, furniture, wire cloth and cigars. The settlement of the place was begun mostly by Germans during the middle of the 18th century. Hanover was laid out in 1763 or 1764 by Col. Richard MacAllister; and in 1815 it was incorporated. On the 30th of June 1863 there was a cavalry engagement in and near Hanover between the forces of Generals H. J. Kilpatrick (Union) and J. E. B. Stuart (Confederate) preliminary to the battle of Gettysburg. This engagement is commemorated by an equestrian statue erected in Hanover by the state.
HANRIOT, FRANÇOIS (1761-1794), French revolutionist, was born at Nanterre (Seine) of poor parentage. Having lost his first employment—with a procureur—through dishonesty, he obtained a clerkship in the Paris octroi in 1789, but was dismissed for abandoning his post when the Parisians burned the octroi barriers on the night of the 12th-13th of July 1789. After leading a hand-to-mouth existence for some time, he became one of the orators of the section of the sans-culottes, and commanded the armed force of that section during the insurrection on the 10th of August 1792 and the massacres of September. But he did not come into prominence until the night of the 30th-31st of May 1793, when he was provisionally appointed commandant-general of the armed forces of Paris by the council general of the Commune. On the 31st of May he was one of the delegates from the Commune to the Convention demanding the dissolution of the Commission of Twelve and the proscription of the Girondists (q.v.), and he was in command of the insurrectionary forces of the Commune during the émeute of the 2nd of June (see [French Revolution]). On the 11th of June he resigned his command, declaring that order had been restored. On the 13th he was impeached in the Convention; but the motion was not carried, and on the 1st of July he was elected by the Commune permanent commander of the armed forces of Paris. This position, which gave him enormous power, he retained until the revolution of the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794). His arrest was decreed; but he had the générale sounded and the tocsin rung, and tried to rescue Robespierre, who was under arrest in the hall of the Comité de Sûreté Générale. Hanriot was himself arrested, but was rescued by his adherents, and hastened to the Hôtel de Ville. After a vain attempt to organize resistance he fled and hid in a secluded yard, where he was discovered the next day. He was arrested, sentenced to death, and guillotined with Robespierre and his friends on the 10th Thermidor of the year II. (the 28th of July 1794).
HANSARD, LUKE (1752-1828), English printer, was born on the 5th of July 1752 in St Mary’s parish, Norwich. He was educated at Boston grammar school, and was apprenticed to Stephen White, a Norwich printer. As soon as his apprenticeship had expired Hansard started for London with only a guinea in his pocket, and became a compositor in the office of John Hughs (1703-1771), printer to the House of Commons. In 1774 he was made a partner, and undertook almost the entire conduct of the business, which in 1800 came completely into his hands. On the admission of his sons the firm became Luke Hansard & Sons. Among those whose friendship Hansard won in the exercise of his profession were Robert Orme, Burke and Dr Johnson; while Porson praised him as the most accurate printer of Greek. He printed the Journals of the House of Commons from 1774 till his death. The promptitude and accuracy with which Hansard printed parliamentary papers were often of the greatest service to government—notably on one occasion when the proof-sheets of the report of the Secret Committee on the French Revolution were submitted to Pitt twenty-four hours after the draft had left his hands. On the union with Ireland in 1801, the increase of parliamentary printing compelled Hansard to give up all private printing except when parliament was not sitting. He devised numerous expedients for reducing the expense of publishing the reports; and in 1805, when his workmen struck at a time of great pressure, he and his sons themselves set to work as compositors. Luke Hansard died on the 29th of October 1828.
His son, Thomas Curson Hansard (1776-1833), established a press of his own in Paternoster Row, and began in 1803 to print the Parliamentary Debates, which were not at first independent reports, but were taken from the newspapers. After 1889 the debates were published by the Hansard Publishing Union Limited. T. C. Hansard was the author of Typographia, an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing (1825). The original business remained in the hands of his younger brothers, James and Luke Graves Hansard (1777-1851). The firm was prosecuted in 1837 by John Joseph Stockwell for printing by order of the House of Commons, in an official report of the inspector of prisons, statements regarded by the plaintiff as libellous. Hansard sheltered himself on the ground of privilege, but it was not until after much litigation that the security of the printers of government reports was guaranteed by statute in 1840.
HANSEATIC LEAGUE. It is impossible to assign any precise date for the beginning of the Hanseatic League or to name any single factor which explains the origin of that loose but effective federation of North German towns. Associated action and partial union among these towns can be traced back to the 13th century. In 1241 we find Lübeck and Hamburg agreeing to safeguard the important road connecting the Baltic and the North Sea. The first known meeting of the “maritime towns,” later known as the Wendish group and including Lübeck, Hamburg, Lüneburg, Wismar, Rostock and Stralsund, took place in 1256. The Saxon towns, during the following century, were joining to protect their common interests, and indeed at this period town confederacies in Germany, both North and South, were so considerable as to call for the declaration against them in the Golden Bull of 1356. The decline of the imperial power and the growing opposition between the towns and the territorial princes justified these defensive town alliances, which in South Germany took on a peculiarly political character. The relative weakness of territorial power in the North, after the fall of Henry the Lion of Saxony, diminished without however removing this motive for union, but the comparative immunity from princely aggression on land left the towns freer to combine in a stronger and more permanent union for the defence of their commerce by sea and for the control of the Baltic.
While the political element in the development of the Hanseatic League must not be underestimated, it was not so formative as the economic. The foundation was laid for the growth of German towns along the southern shore of the Baltic by the great movement of German colonization of Slavic territory east of the Elbe. This movement, extending in time from about the middle of the 11th to the middle of the 13th century and carrying a stream of settlers and traders from the North-west, resulted not only in the Germanization of a wide territory but in the extension of German influence along the sea-coast far to the east of actual territorial settlement. The German trading towns, at the mouths of the numerous streams which drain the North European plain, were stimulated or created by the unifying impulse of a common and long-continued advance of conquest and colonization.
The impetus of this remarkable movement of expansion not only carried German trade to the East and North within the Baltic basin, but reanimated the older trade from the lower Rhine region to Flanders and England in the West. Cologne and the Westphalian towns, the most important of which were Dortmund, Soest and Münster, had long controlled this commerce but now began to feel the competition of the active traders of the Baltic, opening up that direct communication by sea from the Baltic to western Europe which became the essential feature in the history of the League. The necessity of seeking protection from the sea-rovers and pirates who infested these waters during the whole period of Hanseatic supremacy, the legal customs, substantially alike in the towns of North Germany, which governed the groups of traders in the outlying trading posts, the establishment of common factories, or “counters” (Komtors) at these points, with aldermen to administer justice and to secure trading privileges for the community of German merchants—such were some of the unifying influences which preceded the gradual formation of the League. In the century of energetic commercial development before 1350 the German merchants abroad led the way.