The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (37 page)

The fleet came into Bergen each spring with
the newcomers. Their first challenge was the ‘games’. The boys had to be
men, and they had to be initiated. They were keel-hauled, tied up with rope and pulled
right under a ship; they were held over barrels of burning, stinking stuff; they were
hoisted up smoking chimneys to be cross-examined on nothing in particular while they
choked. They were thrown three times into deep water and had to get back into the boat
to stay alive while a congregation of older merchants beat them. They were given drink
until they were drunk, stripped naked and blindfolded, and then whipped until they bled,
with drums more or less covering their screams; after which they had to sing a comic
song. They had their mouths and noses stuffed with dogshit and catshit, they were
subject to ‘unclean shaves’; they went ‘eel treading’ and
‘pig scalding’. They learned to say nothing, never to complain, never to
cry.

These games must have mattered very much
because they survived into the middle of the sixteenth century. Established merchants
took turns to organize them; they served as the last chance to check a man’s
credentials, his town of origin and his single-mindedness, before admission to the club.
It might seem as though the games were
meant
to discourage rich, soft, comfortable townee kids from coming to a trading post run by
tough country people who knew about dung and muck; but things were not that simple.
There were townspeople, and rich ones, going under the keel or up the chimney at Bergen,
and it’s not clear that anyone was ever put off by the games: once they were over,
after all, a boy was a Hansa man for life.
¹⁰
In any case, the games fitted the
Hansa style. When members from Dutch towns were accused of trading with outsider
Dutchmen in 1468, they weren’t just barred from business and told they could no
longer eat at the Hansa’s common table. They were taken out, stripped to their
underwear and made to grovel for forgiveness before all the other assembled
merchants.
¹¹
Read
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
and it all makes a
queasy kind of sense.

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