The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  Hansards settled in Bergen, but they were meant to keep their distance from the town. By the mid fourteenth century they lived cramped in their own district on the docks, in double rows of long wooden sheds with the narrower end towards the water: like loaf pans or train carriages made of planks. There were warehouses on the narrow ground floor; above were the living quarters where the building widened out, with balconies along the side to take the air. Between each pair of buildings ran a boardwalk with gates at the end, which could be shut tight and locked, so that it was a world that was open mostly to the water and the ships.12

  This was known as the Kontor, which is now Bryggen, and there were three others: in Novgorod and London and Bruges. They were warehouses, dormitories, embassies for the Hansa, and defensible positions and a source of judgement and rulings; and they ran on secrets. Any man who revealed a rule or law of the Kontor to an outsider lost his merchant rights. No outsider servants were allowed, which is why the newcomer boys could expect to do the sweeping, washing, scrubbing, for a while. No outsider could join any of the brotherhoods inside the Kontor, the clubs which bound the members together with faith and beer.

  No man could come to Bergen with a wife from a Hansa town but no man could marry a woman who was not from the Hansa. A hansa, a guild or a union, was a kind of family in which people had to know each other to do business; most agreements were verbal, not written, known only to men who had to trust each other. Since just doing business with a non-Hansa member could cost a man two fingers, it is not surprising that marrying out was rare.13

  And yet there were children in those wet, narrow alleys in the Kontor, and not just the teenagers who cleaned and cooked and made the beds; we know because their toys survived. There are bones with holes for a string, noise-makers, made like the ones from Lübeck; so someone brought either toys or the idea for the toys with him. There are curious dolls, some of them like flat-headed priests, some just sticks with faces carved at both ends, and ceramic horses that may have been weights but might also be from the model tournaments that children liked in Lübeck. There are small skates and balls made of leather, some made from six or more pieces, and marbles that might have been for adults, and humming tops and what look remarkably like yo-yos. There are also toy weapons in the ground, but fewer and fewer once the Hansa arrives and the time of civil wars comes to an end in Norway. Those walkways heard children laughing, shouting, crying.14

  The Hansa did make room for women. Some accounts talk of boatloads arriving from Hamburg and Bremen every spring.15 The rules forbade bringing a prostitute into the Kontor on four holy evenings in the winter and any night there was free beer, but that left a fair number of nights wide open. The greatest cluster of various businesses, hostels, taverns, boarding houses with ‘poor women’ – which means women without family, husband or mentionable trade – was right at the North End of the Kontor, with 243 women in residence; there were only thirty-three others in all the rest of Bergen.16 Pleasure was on the doorstep, and the Hansa had no great enthusiasm for moralizing when a merchant strayed. They promised to throw out any man having an affair with a woman in Bergen, married or unmarried; but around 1440 Hermann Luckow was accused of stealing the wife of a rival Norwegian trader and the Kontor invaded the courtroom and broke up his trial. Somehow, in the process, it was the Norwegian who disappeared without trace.17

  Men had outdoor families, the ones away from home, which is an old imperial habit; and we know because they sometimes acknowledge them in their wills. Henricus de Staden in 1369 wanted to look after ‘Elizabeth, my daughter in Bergen’;18 others left forty marks for ‘my surviving sons in Bergen in Norway’19 or the same amount, as Herman Pael did, for ‘in Norway, a woman whose name is Tzolewich, and her daughter Gherdouden’.20 Hans Boyseman’s will, from 1441, suggests he had quite a family in the north: ‘Item: to the three children I have in Norway, I donate altogether 100 marks and 80 marks Lübeck and to their mother I donate 20 marks Lübeck.’ Fathering a child was an offence against the Kontor’s rules, but since the only penalty was to provide a barrel of beer for everyone else, it also sounds like something to celebrate.

  Their local rivals never amounted to much. Any Norwegian could do business for a while; doing business simply meant going out to sea for yourself, or walking the roads for yourself, with whatever money you could borrow or scrounge or save. It was individual and amateur, not organized. So many country people went sailing, leaving the fields untended, that in 1260 the law changed; you needed a fortune of at least three marks to go trading in the summer season. Even then, Norway’s international traders included peasants and middling people. The only boss on any ship was the one elected by the crew of fellow merchants, and the guilds stood ready to cover the losses of traders and peasants equally when they were doing business – as long as they did not sail through war zones.

  The Hansa was different – more serious. Hansa ships were much more rigidly disciplined, and the merchants ruled. In the general law of the sea, the merchant couldn’t complain if the ship’s captain thought it necessary to throw cargo overboard in a storm, and the crew had the right to vote on whether to leave harbour in bad weather. With the Hansa, it was the merchants, not the sailors, who would decide if and when to jettison. In Lübeck, and this was one law that went through all the Hansa towns, a sailor who didn’t save the freight would have his ears cut and spend time in jail; anywhere else he just lost pay and had to find another ship.21

  Over the years grander Norwegian persons, with money to invest, began to take over the trading, but they had many other interests and they always felt the need to draw a line between their ‘distinguished’ trading and plain, vulgar money-making, for fear of being confused with ‘those who call themselves merchants but are nothing more than crooks and rag and bone men’. The instructions to young nobles who wanted to buy and sell, in a manual called the Speculum regale, include close observation of other distinguished merchants, working only until you lunch at mid-day, and having a white cloth for your dinner table. A gentleman was meant to stop sailing the moment he had enough money and when he knew as much about the world as any gentleman wanted to know.22

  The Hansa merchants, on the other hand, made business their whole life. Some of them did have land but land was not enough to guarantee a man’s living or his standing. There were some two hundred villages attached to Lübeck at one point, a third of the whole duchy of Saxony–Lauenburg, but that was territory bought along trade routes to protect them better; and the land was a burden. It made men take their eyes away from the sea.

  By the 1400s, though, the Hansa had factions: those who approved of owning land, having territory like any duke or prince, against those who cared only for business on the sea. In Lübeck there were flares of trouble and then in 1408 a full-scale uprising. The councillors of Lübeck were mostly older, enthusiasts for the influence and standing of the Hansa, and they were landowners who cared about the countryside around the town and not just the business on the docks; but this old guard had already lost enough members in plague years to be unsure of their power. A council which had been solid for prestige and territory was now open to factions. A debate began about what kind of ambitions the Hansa should have. The new men demanded what they called their ‘old rights’, which meant the town should concentrate on trade and the sea, its special genius, and pay no attention to being a land power; the town should never go beyond the ambitions of its citizens, or at least not theirs. A Committee of Sixty formed against the town council, and at least thirty-four of them were merchants; some were Bergenfahrer, traders to Bergen, including their leader, Johan Grove. They risked insurrection to make sure that power came back to the sea traders, the merchants and shopkeepers whose world was inside their ledgers, and inside the city walls. They wanted only to be traders.

  The town was electric with rumours that the council had turned all the weapons on the city’s towers inwards on the citizens. Come January, and the annual procession of the town council, a
mob broke up the ceremonies and ran the terrified council members indoors. The burgomaster begged their spokesman: ‘Tell them what you want, and what you can answer for, but for God’s sake quiet them down.’ The protesters’ man bellowed out of a window to the crowd: ‘You will choose the council!’ The prospect of change was enough to start a party so raucous that fifteen out of the twenty-three town councillors decided to take their chances, get out of town and go to live for ever in exile.23

  This was not a people’s revolt; it was a taxpayers’ rising, with the brewers taking the lead alongside the merchants. The rebels were alarmed by the council’s incompetence; they had somehow managed to let the town mint go bankrupt. They refused to pay higher taxes to get rid of the town’s debts because they were against all the ambitions and ideas that caused the debts in the first place: an interest in acquiring territory, not protecting trade, with pursuing power like an ordinary nation, risking the costs of wars and feuds.

  The uprising was political in an almost modern way: not so much about who has power but what they ought to do with it and what limits should be put on a state.

  The Hansa almost always tried to preserve the old guard and their familiar old ways; it had thrown out the town of Brunswick for daring to eject its council and now it threw out Lübeck. The Emperor made Lübeck an outlaw town for daring to opt out of the great game of nations, but the revolt spread alarmingly, to the port of Hamburg, which like Lübeck commanded the river route to the North Sea, to Rostock and Wismar, which could make endless trouble in the Baltic. Since there was nobody to quell the uprising, the result was a kind of merchants’ coup: no undue ambition, no international politics, nothing except the duty to keep the ships sailing.

  There were advantages in these limits. Unlike landowners, the Hansa men could sail away from trouble, sail somewhere else or go back home, and they did. Their emperor and overlords were sometimes their enemies, but never quite their masters. They had no overbearing clergy to remind them to agonize over how to set a just price and whether profit was a sin. They could concentrate.

  The divisions in Lübeck help explain why Hansa men were oddly reluctant to say exactly what a Hansa was, or who belonged to it; a bit of doubt kept things together. It was a corporate kind of power which liked its privacy.

  An irate letter to the English privy council in 1469 said the Hansa was definitely not a societas, a collegium nor yet a universitas. It didn’t have property in common, each merchant traded for himself, it had no common seal and no common business manager and, besides, the member towns were ‘widely separated … as the royal letters acknowledge’. The merchants didn’t control it, because various lords and magistrates controlled each member town, and when the Hansa wrote a letter it carried only the seal of the town where it was written. The Hansa said it was a ‘mere grouping of towns’, ‘a kind of alliance’, ‘a firm confederatio of many cities, towns and communities’ to make sure business went well and there was ‘effective protection against pirates and highwaymen, so that their ambushes should not rob merchants of their goods and valuables’.24

  They had good reason at the time to write that letter: they were trying to save all the Hansa towns, whichever ones happened to have ships in harbour at the time, from being made to pay for the politics or the misdeeds of a single member. Rostock and Hamburg wanted to be able to sail on even if Lübeck or Bruges was deep in some dispute over tax or sailing rights; they were happy to share privileges, but not responsibility. They relished the very obvious paradox: here was a seemingly vague, amorphous sort of group, barely able to organize a meeting every few years to make decisions, and yet able to make war efficiently on Flanders, France, England, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Holland at various times, to raise the money for ships like a nation, sign treaties at the end and even manage kings, imposing them and deposing them.

  It took effective control of trade over the Baltic and then the North Sea, without even a sniff of legal right. In the law that was general in Europe, but not so settled in the north, the sea belonged to nobody, and everybody had the right to sail on it. Justinian’s version of the civil law of Rome lays down that ‘The sea is for everyone’s use, but nobody’s property, just as air is for common use but has no owner … but the jurisdiction is Caesar’s.’ In other words, a proper power, a king or emperor, had the right to police the sea and beat back thieves and pirates. The more pirates bothered shipping, the stronger the idea of territorial waters grew, a right of self-protection on the water.25 But nobody thought the Hansa was such a proper power, not even the Hansa, and no such power had the right to decide who could sail where and why and when. The Hansa made its own legal reality by wars and blockades and treaties, an alternative law which made its merchant members perversely legalistic with other people; the citizens of Bergen in 1560 were furious about the damage the Kontor was doing and asked the king for help because the Hanseatics ‘always sent such learned men to any negotiations that the people of Bergen could not defend themselves’.26

  The Hansa was a new kind of body when it emerged, but its name was familiar. In a fourth-century translation of the Bible in Gothic, hansa was the word used for the gang who come to take Christ prisoner in the garden at Gethsemane: a band of men, a club. This was not a promising start. Charlemagne worried in the eighth century about the guilds called hanse because they swore oaths of loyalty when they should have been loyal only to him; they were rivals. Hansa became the word for a union of merchants, usually from one town, sometimes from several; there was the Flemish Hanse of the Seventeen Towns and the Danish Guild of St Canute, campaigning to get and hold on to privileges in foreign ports. There were the fishermen who spread their risks by ‘sharing a herring ship with someone else’.27 They were little arrangements, minimal alliances until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  Then came the Emperor Frederick II, the wonder of the world, some said, and fiercely ambitious to rule Italy and keep down the Pope. He called his birthplace Bethlehem and his followers called him Messiah; the Pope called him Antichrist and felt obliged to excommunicate him four times. Such a man could not be expected to attend to the details of what was done in his name and, in the interests of his Italian campaigns, the Emperor thought it wise to allow the feudal lords all the powers they needed to raise all the money he needed for war. They each imposed different laws and different coins and different weights and measures. This had consequences they never intended. You could make a profit just by buying cloth by the ell in Lübeck and selling it in Riga, even if you didn’t put up the price, because the Riga ell was shorter than the one in the west. The tolls for passing up and down the Rhine became such a confusion that English merchants called them ‘the German madness’.

  The Emperor didn’t interfere with the towns, but he didn’t help them or make alliances with them as the French kings did; he was too distracted. The towns felt entitled to act independently, with just enough co-operation to make sure they could act as they wanted. They already had their associations from before Frederick was born. They were used to meeting each year from the last weeks of August to the first weeks of October to buy herring at the beach fairs in Scania, in southern Sweden: a free-for-all market which became in the thirteenth century the start of new towns. The Gotland association of merchants who did business in Sweden combined to sail in convoys for greater safety, to act together overseas, to bury any merchant who died abroad. The association thrived without any undue interference, it became the Hansa and the Hansa took over the Scania fairs. In 1189, it signed its first treaty with a foreign prince: promising trade and profits, demanding privileges and especially low taxes.

  The modern trade-off between politics and money had begun.

  Town leagues replaced the more personal, almost family associations of merchants because the town was the one political power to which they might have to answer; so it was logical that the Hansa be organized town by town, with a man’s standing defined by the town he came from. Town was family now. There were eventually
some two hundred towns involved around the Baltic and the North Sea. Beside the member towns, who expected to be heard from time to time on matters of policy, there were other ports like Lynn in England whose livelihood was tied to the Hansa, and some like Boston in Lincolnshire that were downright dependent. And then there were the Kontors, Hansa towns inside other towns, often walled away. The Bergen Kontor put up a wall after a violent row with the town, but it lasted only three years in the 1520s before the town insisted it come down.28 The Peterhof at Novgorod was something between a fort and a tenement with its own locked and private church for storing valuables, and the Steelyard in London was a walled enclosure that could be closed down. In Bruges, the Hansa had no walls, just a tendency to cluster around the Bourse. Its meeting place was the refectory of the Carmelite monastery and eventually it built a guildhouse of solid brick and painted beams, but hardly had a chance to use it before the harbour at Bruges silted over and it quit the town.29

  The Hansa acknowledged no centre, although in practice it was often Lübeck that called meetings of its council, the Hansetag. The council did not meet every year, which was one more problem when the group wanted to take action. The one clear interest you’d think the whole Hansa shared was open seas, and as little trouble as possible from pirates. It did not work that way.