of great pressure, he and his sons themselves set to work as compositors. Luke Hansard died on the 29th of October 1828.
His son, Thomas Curson Hansard (1776–1833), established a press of his own in Paternoster Row, and began in 1803 to print the Parliamentary Debates, which were not at first independent reports, but were taken from the newspapers. After 1889 the debates were published by the Hansard Publishing Union Limited. T. C. Hansard was the author of Typographia, an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing (1825). The original business remained in the hands of his younger brothers, James and Luke Graves Hansard (1777–1851). The firm was prosecuted in 1837 by John Joseph Stockwell for printing by order of the House of Commons, in an official report of the inspector of prisons, statements regarded by the plaintiff as libellous. Hansard sheltered himself on the ground of privilege, but it was not until after much litigation that the security of the printers of government reports was guaranteed by statute in 1840.
HANSEATIC LEAGUE. It is impossible to assign any
precise date for the beginning of the Hanseatic League or
to name any single factor which explains the origin of that
loose but effective federation of North German towns. Associated
action and partial union among these towns can be
traced back to the 13th century. In 1241 we find Lübeck and
Hamburg agreeing to safeguard the important road connecting
the Baltic and the North Sea. The first known meeting of
the “maritime towns,” later known as the Wendish group and
including Lübeck, Hamburg, Lüneburg, Wismar, Rostock and
Stralsund, took place in 1256. The Saxon towns, during the
following century, were joining to protect their common interests,
and indeed at this period town confederacies in Germany, both
North and South, were so considerable as to call for the declaration
against them in the Golden Bull of 1356. The decline of
the imperial power and the growing opposition between the
towns and the territorial princes justified these defensive town
alliances, which in South Germany took on a peculiarly political
character. The relative weakness of territorial power in the
North, after the fall of Henry the Lion of Saxony, diminished
without however removing this motive for union, but the
comparative immunity from princely aggression on land left
the towns freer to combine in a stronger and more permanent
union for the defence of their commerce by sea and for the
control of the Baltic.
While the political element in the development of the Hanseatic League must not be underestimated, it was not so formative as the economic. The foundation was laid for the growth of German towns along the southern shore of the Baltic by the great movement of German colonization of Slavic territory east of the Elbe. This movement, extending in time from about the middle of the 11th to the middle of the 13th century and carrying a stream of settlers and traders from the Northwest, resulted not only in the Germanization of a wide territory but in the extension of German influence along the sea-coast far to the east of actual territorial settlement. The German trading towns, at the mouths of the numerous streams which drain the North European plain, were stimulated or created by the unifying impulse of a common and long-continued advance of conquest and colonization.
The impetus of this remarkable movement of expansion not only carried German trade to the East and North within the Baltic basin, but reanimated the older trade from the lower Rhine region to Flanders and England in the West. Cologne and the Westphalian towns, the most important of which were Dortmund, Soest and Münster, had long controlled this commerce but now began to feel the competition of the active traders of the Baltic, opening up that direct communication by sea from the Baltic to western Europe which became the essential feature in the history of the League. The necessity of seeking protection from the sea-rovers and pirates who infested these waters during the whole period of Hanseatic supremacy, the legal customs, substantially alike in the towns of North Germany, which governed the groups of traders in the outlying trading posts, the establishment of common factories, or “counters” (Komtors) at these points, with aldermen to administer justice and to secure trading privileges for the community of German merchants—such were some of the unifying influences which preceded the gradual formation of the League. In the century of energetic commercial development before 1350 the German merchants abroad led the way.
Germans were early pushing as permanent settlers into the Scandinavian towns, and in Wisby, on the island of Gothland, the Scandinavian centre of Baltic trade, equal rights as citizens in the town government were possessed by the German settlers as early as the beginning of the 13th century. There also came into existence at Wisby the first association of German traders abroad, which united the merchants of over thirty towns, from Cologne and Utrecht in the West to Reval in the East. We find the Gothland association making in 1229 a treaty with a Russian prince and securing privileges for their branch trading station at Novgorod. According to the “Skra,” the by-laws of the Novgorod branch, the four aldermen of the community of Germans, who among other duties held the keys of the common chest, deposited in Wisby, were to be chosen from the merchants of the Gothland association and of the towns of Lübeck, Soest and Dortmund. The Gothland association received in 1237 trading rights in England, and shortly after the middle of the century it also secured privileges in Flanders. It legislated on matters relating to common trade interests, and, in the case of the regulation of 1287 concerning shipwrecked goods, we find it imposing this legislation on the towns under the penalty of exclusion from the association. But with the extension of the East and West trade beyond the confines of the Baltic, this association by the end of the century was losing its position of leadership. Its inheritance passed to the gradually forming union of towns, chiefly those known as Wendish, which looked to Lübeck as their head. In 1293 the Saxon and Wendish merchants at Rostock decided that all appeals from Novgorod be taken to Lübeck instead of to Wisby, and six years later the Wendish and Westphalian towns, meeting at Lübeck, ordered that the Gothland association should no longer use a common seal. Though Lübeck’s right as court of appeal from the Hanseatic counter at Novgorod was not recognized by the general assembly of the League until 1373, the long-existing practice had simply accorded with the actual shifting of commercial power. The union of merchants abroad was beginning to come under the control of the partial union of towns at home.
A similar and contemporary extension of the influence of the Baltic traders under Lübeck’s leadership may be witnessed in the West. As a consequence of the close commercial relations early existing between England and the Rhenish-Westphalian towns, the merchants of Cologne were the first to possess a gild-hall in London and to form a “hansa” with the right of admitting other German merchants on payment of a fee. The charter of 1226, however, by which Emperor Frederick II. created Lübeck a free imperial city, expressly declared that Lübeck citizens trading in England should be free from the dues imposed by the merchants of Cologne and should enjoy equal rights and privileges. In 1266 and 1267 the merchants of Hamburg and Lübeck received from Henry III. the right to establish their own hansas in London, like that of Cologne. The situation thus created led by 1282 to the coalescence of the rival associations in the “Gild-hall of the Germans,” but though the Baltic traders had secured a recognized foothold in the enlarged and unified organization, Cologne retained the controlling interest in the London settlement until 1476. Lübeck and Hamburg, however, dominated the German trade in the ports of the east coast, notably in Lynn and Boston, while they were strong in the organized trading settlements at York, Hull, Ipswich, Norwich, Yarmouth and Bristol. The counter at London, first called the Steelyard in a parliamentary petition of 1422, claimed jurisdiction over the other factories in England.
In Flanders, also, the German merchants from the West had long been trading, but here had later to endure not only the rivalry but the pre-eminence of those from the East. In 1252 the first treaty privileges for German trade in Flanders show
