times enabled to engage in other branches with such advantages as nearly precluded all competition. Thus, on the stoppage of the direct trade with the Netherlands, in 1493, it is recorded that great quantities of Flemish manufactures were still imported into England by the merchants of the Steelyard from their own Hanse towns; and that this activity of the foreigners, in a trade from which they were themselves excluded, so enraged the native merchants that they incited the London journeymen and apprentices to rise in a tumult, in which they attacked and rifled the warehouses of the obnoxious Germans. In 1505, when Henry VII. granted a charter of incorporation to the Company of Merchant Adventurers of England, whose proper business was described to be to trade in woollen cloth of all kinds to the Netherlands, the merchants of the Steelyard, or Easterlings, as they were called, were express]y prohibited from interfering with that branch of commerce; and the aldermen or governors of the association were obliged to enter into a recognisance of two thousand marks that none of the members should carry any English cloth to the place of residence of the English Merchant Adventurers in the Low Countries. Disputes between the two rival interests, however, continued to arise from time to time; and, at last, in 1520, we find King Henry appointing commissioners to treat at Bruges with others to be appointed by the Hanse Towns, concerning the
several privileges at any time granted to the Hanseatic League by the king or his predecessors; for the removal of the abuses, unjust usages, extensions, enlargements, restrictions, and other misinterpretations of their rights with which the Hanseatic merchants in England might be chargeable, and for the conclusion of a new treaty of commerce between England and the said Hanseatic League. What was the issue of this congress does not appear. Meanwhile the Merchant Adventurers, as they grew in wealth and power, became less disposed than ever to tolerate with patience either the irregular encroachments of the foreign company, or even the existence of its invidious privileges within their legal limits. The
