THE BEGINNING OF TRADE 



The Discipline of the League. 



Lubeck was the moving spirit of the League from the beginning 

 and brooked no rival. In the middle of the fourteenth century Bremen, 

 realising its magnificent geographical position, attempted to raise its 

 status and immediately became suspect. At the first slight excuse the 

 League banished the city from its membership and literally starved it 

 in every way until, in order to get back the right to exist, Bremen had 

 to undertake crushing responsibilities. 

 The Steelyard. 



The headquarters of the Hansa in London were situated in what 

 was known as the " Steelyard," an area on the riverside quite close to 

 the site of the present Cannon Street Railway Bridge. They were 

 allowed to settle here in 1250 and nine years later Henry III gave them 

 very important privileges which were confirmed by Edward I. They 

 were very unpopular with their London neighbours, partly because they 

 had more privileges than the natives and certainly more than they 

 would have been allowed in their own homes, and partly because they 

 were so much more prosperous than the English. They were literally 

 a state within a state ; their habits and customs were those of the 

 fourteenth-century German, which were very unpleasant indeed. Also 

 they were arrogant to a degree, so that it is not surprising that the mob 

 attempted to attack them on more than one occasion and generally got 

 the worst of it. In the reign of Edward VI the Hanseatic League inter- 

 fered so much with the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers that they 

 were stripped of many of their privileges and were finally expelled from 

 England by Queen Elizabeth in 1597. They retained the site, however, 

 until it was bought by the railway some seventy years ago. 

 The Decline of the League. 



The fortunes of the League began to decline in the fifteenth century 

 when the herrings for some mysterious reason suddenly deserted the 

 Baltic. Soon afterwards the limbs of the League began to get mutinous, 

 especially the branches in Russia. For the next hundred years and 

 more the rot from within increased until by 1669 only Liibeck, Bremen 

 and Hamburg remained, with unimportant outside colonies. 

 James I and Commerce. 



Owing to the development of the chartered companies and the 

 comparative peace at sea for a large part of his reign, the time of James I 

 is usually credited with being a golden time for commerce but as a 

 matter of fact it thrived despite handicaps. During his reign the 

 customs officials were very corrupt indeed ; at one moment they were 

 victimising the shipowners and merchants and then coming to some 

 agreement with them by which the Crown got practically nothing. The 

 result was that nobody quite knew where he was, which was the most 

 dangerous possibility of all for the development of trade. 

 The Development of the Slave Trade. 



The manner in which the slave trade was started by Hawkyns has 

 already been told and for a long time the trade was confined to the 



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