Thomas, and a daughter, Juliana. Thomas failed to take the monastic vows, but joined the army of the Crusaders under Count Baldwin the ninth of Flanders, and assisted at the conquest of Constantinople, where, with his leader, he disappears from the stage, but Juliana became the wife of Thedmar, a native of the city of Bremen, and by him the mother of eleven children. One of these, born on the 9th of August, 1201, received in baptism the name of his grandfather—Arnold. He was destined to act for a number of years an important part in the affairs of the city of London, where he appears about the middle of the century as one of the aldermen. This worthy officiated for several years as alderman of the Teutonic Guild, which association, with his aldermanhood of the city, cannot but have been of the greatest advantage to the trade and privileges of the Steelyard. The policy of standing well with the civic authorities, induced the Hanse merchants to be liberal in their gifts, and, accordingly, on every New Year’s Day, they presented the Lord Mayor with fifteen gold nobles (a coin of the value of six shillings and eightpence), wrapped in a pair of new gloves, in conformity with an old custom, as it appears, by the laws of the Saxon king, Ethelred the Second. They likewise presented the new Lord Mayor on his election to office with a keg of the best sturgeon, commutable into forty shillings, and two barrels of herrings, worth two nobles; and a hundred-weight of Polish wax, commutable likewise into forty shillings. Andrew Aubrey, who seems to have been a great favourite with the foreign merchants, received from them a voluntary gift of fifty marks. By means of these voluntary customs they preserved their own jurisdiction as emanating from an alderman whom they themselves had chosen. These politic merchants are found to be not sparing of their wealth in other payments and donations. They paid considerable fees to their own counsel, who were chosen from the serjeants at law; to the usher of the Royal Star Chamber, who with due formality was regularly invited to the annual festival given in the Steelyard, on the day of Saint Barbara (December 4th), a dinner at which a couple of magnificent codfish were considered an indispensable dish, to the Lord Mayor and Sheriff of the city of London, their ushers, and yeomen, and to the servants of the ministers of the crown, the Lord Chancellor, and the First Lord of the Treasury.
In the kindly intercourse maintained by the Steelyard merchants with their neighbours of the city, they make a buxom and gallant figure among the pageantry in which citizens ever delighted.
When Henry the Sixth returned in February, 1431, from Paris, a magnificent reception was given to him on his entrance into London, the Lord Mayor, Sheriffs, and Aldermen riding on horseback, in their purple and scarlet robes, richly lined with fur. John Lydgate, the rhyming monk of Bury, who describes this spectacle does not fail to include the German merchants.
And Esterlings[1] clad in her maneres,
Conveyed with the sergeauntes and other officeres,
Estatly horsed aftyr the maior riding,
Passed the suburbis to mete with the kyng.
But it is with the dis racted reign of this imbecile and ill-fated monarch, and the strife that ensued between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, that the reverses of the thriving community of the Steelyard begin to appear, and in addition to the drawbacks of an unruly and seditious time, the jealousy of native merchants interposed to their disturbance. Added to those adverse influences, great resentment was created by certain cities, members of the Union, by their reprisals upon some English traders who had committed a breach of the peace and disturbance on the high seas. At one time the English captured a fleet of 108 vessels belonging to Lubeck and to Riga houses, which being heavily laden with salt, were bound on their way homewards, just passing the Bay of Biscay.
In revenge, the large Bergen trading vessels of Lubeck infested for a considerable time the whole of the German sea, and seized many English galleys laden with cloth and other merchandise. These reprisals continuing, to the great detriment of commerce in general for some years, several ambassadors passed to and fro, but without much progress towards a settlement of the dispute. It was demanded, on the part of the English, that the merchants of Almaigne should pay the same duty on wine and wool which all other foreigners who frequented the English markets were subjected to. In 1469 they were condemned to pay a fine of 13,520l., many members of the guild were taken into custody, and the privileges and the property of their establishment in London were in jeopardy of being finally seized. The rupture, when at the worst, was taken up by the English parliament, and Henry the Sixth brought about a settlement in a peace concluded at Utrecht, and ratified at Westminster on July 20th, 1474, by which their old privileges were restored intact to the Hanse merchants.
After riding out this storm at the imminent peril of foundering, the Hanse merchants contrived to steer their way amid the troubled waters of the Reformation, and enjoyed their civil and religious liberties nearly to the end of the 16th century. The great change, however, which ensued in the maritime character of the English during the reign of Elizabeth was inimical to the stability of the foreigners, and after Drake and Norris had taken sixty Hanseatic vessels, and in reprisal English residents had been expelled from Elbing and Stade, the German merchants were ordered to quit the Steelyard, by a royal writ dated January 13th, 1598. The property was appropriated by the crown as a depository of naval stores, but soon after the death of Elizabeth it was given back by contract to its former owners, on condition of their admitting, on similar terms, the English merchant-adventurers to the ports of Hamburgh, Lubeck, and other towns.
But it appears from some passages that the Steelyard privileges had previously been with-- ↑ This designation of Easterling, by which the German merchants were popularly distinguished, originated the word sterling as applied to coin. The Easterling money was at the time much superior to the common English currency. It was likewise called silver of Guthrum’s Lane—a neighbouring thoroughfare chiefly occupied by the gold-beaters, for whose purpose the German metals were in request.
