Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 1. Green Alice Stopford

176 the Adventurers had to migrate to Calais, and see the legal trade with the Low Countries given to the Easterlings, a sight which “sore nipped their hearts;” but first in “disordered” fashion, then lawfully, they were soon back at their old occupations.177 With the steady support of Henry the Seventh, whose whole policy was directed to develope the trade with Burgundy and bind England and the Netherlands into a united commercial state, their prosperity was assured; and before the close of the century Antwerp, after two hundred years of struggle for supremacy in trade, took its place as the great centre of commerce178 in the Netherlands, while its rival Bruges sank into utter poverty and decay. When at last after many chances and changes, the English won in 1506 through Henry the Seventh free trade in cloth throughout all the dominions of the Archduke Philip save Flanders, they actually found themselves better off in the Netherlands than the native merchants, paid less tolls than they, and were in a position whence they might easily overrun the country with their wares and finally destroy its decaying cloth industry.179

      From their central stronghold in Antwerp the Merchant Adventurers further maintained a lively war to right and left, on the one side with the Staple at Calais, on the other with the Hanseatic League.

      It was practically the jealousy of the Staplers that had first driven the Adventurers from Bruges, and no sooner did they feel their strength than they prepared to make their ancient enemies pay the penalty for old wrongs. Towards the merchants of the Staple the very character of their trade from the first forced them into a militant attitude. Shut out from all interest in the sale of wool, their fortune rested solely on the manufacturing industries, and the more weaving at home was encouraged the greater were their gains.180 And since the wool merchants proceeded both to claim and to practise the right of exporting and selling cloth as well as wool, they became in a double sense obnoxious to their rivals. Now, however, the Adventurers could fight from the vantage ground given them by their new position as a chartered company. Out of their acknowledged right to demand tolls on the sale of cloth in their marts, they deduced by a liberal interpretation of their powers the right to require from each trading Stapler in addition to the ordinary tolls an entrance fee or hanse of ten marks, by payment of which he became a freeman of the Adventurers’ Company and was made subject to their laws and courts,181 and if he refused to pay they seized his wares, or imprisoned him till he gave the “hanse.”182 Wealthy merchants of the Staple who had taken their wares to Middleburg might find themselves thrown into prison among felons and murderers infected with odious diseases; the resolute Adventurers refused bail, and quietly ignored royal letters of remonstrance.183 Already in 1457 the Staplers complained bitterly to the English King and to the Duke of Burgundy, that under colour of letters patent and charters, their enemies so vexed them both in their goods and persons as to threaten them with utter ruin.184 But the decision of Henry the Sixth that the Adventurers were asserting unjust claims which were strictly forbidden for the future185 scarcely interrupted the battle, and the same series of complaints and aggressions was brought in 1504 before the Star Chamber, by whose judgement the Adventurers were again forbidden to go beyond their right of levying tolls. But if the law was against them they had on their side their own inexhaustible activity, their unscrupulous audacity, their large self-confidence, and the weakness of the dying company of the Staple. Six years later when the Staplers again summoned them before the King for their “crooked minds and froward sayings” and lawless deeds of violence, they answered with uncompromising contempt. The Staplers, they allowed, might have certain privileges in Calais – but as to talking of rights in Burgundy, that in their opinion was absurd to urge after the removal of the Staple thence. Outside Calais the Staplers had no rights. With regard to their claim to exclusive jurisdiction over their members, “that article might have been left out of their book, for why every reasonable man knoweth the contrary.” In spite of such “reasonable men,” however, once more the law was proclaimed to be against them; but as they knew well the law was powerless to set up again the ruined company of the Merchant Staplers.186

      With the second and more formidable army arrayed against them, the merchants of the Hanseatic League, the war of the Adventurers had to be carried on with greater circumspection. Through a couple of centuries the doubtful conflict was maintained on every sea and in every port from Danzig to Iceland. For the first hundred years things went ill for the Adventurers. The League monopolized the whole commerce between the Scandinavian kingdoms and England;187 drove out the English from Schonen, the centre to which all the fishers of the Baltic and North Seas gathered for the salting, packing, and selling of their fish;188 harassed them with fire and sword in Bergen, the Staple town of the north,189 scattering them at one time by starvation, at another by decrees of expulsion; banished them from the Prussian towns belonging to the Teutonic Order which they were “destroying” with their cloth,190 and sought to ruin their trade by issuing an order that no merchant of the Hanse should buy English cloth outside England itself. When the League waged war with Denmark and Norway in 1368-9 to confirm its mastery of the Northern Seas, it dragged the English traders at its heels into the fight, and at its close threw them off without a thought.191 It gave a scornful answer to demands made by Parliament under Edward the Third and Richard the Second that the tolls exacted from Hanseatic traders for exporting goods from England should be increased; and retorted by a decree that all trade with England should be utterly broken off, thus shutting the great market at Elbing to the English merchants who had made it the centre of their trade with Russia and the towns of Prussia.192

      The English traders, however, took all misfortune with the hardihood and exuberant courage of youth. Help from their own government was beyond hoping for, so long as conquering kings like Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth were bound hand and foot to the great mercantile houses of Lübeck and the Hanse towns by the loans raised from them to carry on the French wars; while Henry the Fourth, who, before he came to the throne, had been in Danzig and seen the troubles of the English merchants there,193 and who in his anxiety to win the support of the trading class, was persistent in negotiations to improve their position, had not the power to give effect to his desires. The Adventurers, therefore, could only follow the one obvious course open to them, and kept up a steady brigandage on the seas and a series of opportune attacks on the enemy’s out-posts. They held on desperately at Bergen,194 and stoutly clung to the formal right which Henry the Fourth had given them to organize themselves under consuls in Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, for the carrying on of their trade.195 Fishing boats which were shut out from the Baltic or from Bergen sailed on to Iceland, where, as the island was the private property of the King of Norway (who was himself the servant of the League) and was allowed to receive no ships save the King’s, or those licensed by the King, opportunities for illegal trade were abundant and profits large. A frugal people, needy and remote, eagerly welcomed smuggled goods from England in exchange for their fish; and the smugglers carried on a rough business – outlaws and daring men of their company plundered and killed and stole cattle and desolated homesteads, and bartered after their own self-made laws.196 It mattered nothing to them that Henry the Fifth, in obedience to the League, forbade the trade, or that in a storm of 1419 twenty-five English ships were driven on the coast of Iceland in three hours. Bristol men found their way to its shores by help of the compass, leaving for us the first record of its use in England, probably in 1424; and about 1436, in a year when the English had been expelled from Bergen, so many vessels sailed to Iceland that they could get no return

177

Schanz, ii. 582-5.

178

Ibid. i. 7-11.

179

Schanz, i. 31, 32.

180

Ibid. i. 339.

181

Schanz, i. 345; ii. 561, 562.

182

Instances, Schanz, ii. 557, 558.

183

Ibid. ii. 564.

184

Ibid. ii. 543.

185

From Antwerp Archives; Schanz, ii. 539-43.

186

In November, 1504, the Staplers and Adventurers appeared before the Star Chamber. The Staplers pleaded a charter which declared them free from the jurisdiction of the Adventurers. The Star Chamber decided that every Stapler who dealt or traded as an Adventurer was to be subject to the courts and dues of the Adventurers: and every Adventurer dealing as a Stapler in like manner to be subject to the Staple (Schanz, ii. 547). This decision seemed to imply the ruin of Staplers, but the next year it was explained that the authentic interpretation was simply that “the merchants of the Staple at Calais using the feate of a Merchant Adventurer passing to the marts at Calais should in those things be contributories to such impositions and charges” as the Adventurers had fixed (ibid. 549); and that they could not be compelled to join the Adventurers’ company. In 1510 Henry the Eighth repeated the decree of Henry the Seventh that the Adventurers must not force Staplers to join their body (555). For the pleadings before the Star Chamber under Henry the Eighth see Schanz, ii. 556-564.

187

Schanz, i. 249.

188

Keutgen, 42, 51-54.

189

Schanz, i. 251.

190

Keutgen, 30, 81.

191

Ibid. 44, &c.

192

Pauli’s Pictures, 172, 185. Keutgen, 10-43. Richard the Second complained to the Grand Master that traders were forced to carry their cloth to Elbing instead of Danzig (ibid. 72). In 1388 three citizens of London and York were sent to Marienberg with an interpreter to make a treaty of commerce with the “general master of the house of S. Mary of Teutonia.” (Hist. MSS. Com. i. 109.) In 1397, however, trade with the Easterlings was practically stopped. The English imposed enormous duties on German imports; the Germans forbade traffic in English cloth. For the negotiations carried on by Henry the Fourth see Literæ Cantuarienses, iii. xxviii. – xxxi., and the various letters on the subject. The English colony in Danzig increased greatly after the peace of Marienberg. (Schanz, i. 231.) In 1392 more than 300 English came into Danzig to carry corn. (Keutgen, 71.) But the resistance of the Danzig burghers to English trade was strenuous. They were less jealous of the Netherlands manufacturers, and the Teutonic Order in the fifteenth century sent to Dinant for the rough cloth needed for the Baltic trade. (Pirenne, Dinant, 97; Keutgen, 81-83.)

193

Pauli’s Pictures, 135-8.

194

8 H. VI. c. 2; Proc. Privy Council, iv. 208; Schanz, ii. 170.

195

In 1425 there were letters from Henry the Sixth to the King of Dacia, Norwegia, and Swecia, concerning the merchants of Lynn who traded with the parts of North Berne; (Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 203). In 1427 he wrote to the English merchants “in partibus Prucie, Dacie, Norweie, Hanse, and Swethie commorantes,” to assemble in a sufficient place, elect governors and make ordinances for self-government in mercantile matters, and for reasonable punishment of any merchants disobedient (203). At times the English even forced compensation from the Hanse merchants for outrages (Schanz, i. 250). In 1438 rye was brought from Prussia “by the providence of Stephen Browne,” the mayor, at a time of famine in England, when a bushel of corn was sold for 3s. 4d., and the people were making bread of vetches, peas, beans, and fern-roots. (Fabyan, 612.)

196

Schanz, i. 254.