Steelyard
The Steelyard was not the only Hanseatic trading post in England. There were a number of Hanseatic factories on the English east coast, like the remaining Hanseatic warehouse in King's Lynn, Norfolk.
Name
The name seems to indicate the practice of tagging samples (stalen) of inspected wool with a seal.
In Charles Kingsford's commentary on John Stow's A Survey of London (1598 edition) the Middle Low German name Stâlhof is the older usage, appearing as early as 1320. Kingsford traces the first reference to it as the Steelyard to 1382. In 1394 an English merchant writing from Danzig has: In civitate Londonia[...]in Curia Calibis: "In the city of London[...]at the court of steel" (chalybs). Kingsford concludes that Steelyard is a mistaken translation of Stâlhof.
The kontor was also called the Esterlinghall ("Easterling hall") in Middle English, in 1340 for the first time.
Location
The Steelyard was located on the north bank of the Thames by the outflow of the Walbrook, in the Dowgate ward of the City of London. The site is bounded by Cousin Lane on the west, Upper Thames Street on the north, and Allhallows Lane on the east, an area of 5,250 m or 1.3 acres. It is now covered by Cannon Street station and commemorated in the names of Steelyard Passage and Hanseatic Walk. The Steelyard, like other Hansa stations, was a separate walled community with its own warehouses on the river, its own weigh house, chapel, counting houses, a guildhall, cloth halls, wine cellars, kitchens, and residential quarters. The kontor could be accessed by sea-going ships.
As a church the Germans used former All-Hallows-the-Great, since there was only a small chapel on their own premises.
In 1988 remains of the former Hanseatic kontor, once the largest medieval trading complex in Britain, were uncovered by archaeologists during maintenance work on Cannon Street Station.
History
Merchants from Cologne bought a building at the corner of Thames Street and Cousin Lane in the 1170s, though they seem to have used it as early as 1157, and it became known as the "Germans' Guildhall" (Gildahalda teutonicorum). Henry II of England granted very extensive privileges to traders from Cologne in 1175/76 in an attempt to limit the power of Flemish merchants who then controlled the English wool trade. This group from Cologne effectively controlled the trade of Rhine wine and acquired a building called the gildhalla from then on too. They are alluded to in the De itinere navali, an account of crusaders from Lübeck for whom the kontor arranged the purchase of a replacement cog in the summer of 1189. The privileges of the Guildhall existed alongside individual cities' privileges. Low German traders from the area around the Baltic Sea appeared in England too around this time, but they directed their trade more at English towns up north.
Hanseatic kontor
The merchant communities from Westphalia and the Rhineland and from the Baltic formed a joint venture by the mid 13th century. They took over the hegemony in the trade with England from the Flemings later in the century and even began to get involved in the export of English wool to Flanders.
The first mention of a Hansa Almaniae (a "German Hansa") in English records is in 1282, concerning merely the community of the London trading post. This was a union of town merchant guilds (hanses) from Cologne, or the Rhineland, and Lübeck and Hamburg. It was maybe more the result of government pressure from London and the English king than a free decision. The settlement was only later made official as the Steelyard and confirmed in tax and customs concessions granted by Edward I, in a Carta Mercatoria ("merchant charter") of 1303. This led to constant friction over the legal position of English merchants in the Hanseatic towns and Hanseatic privileges in England, which repeatedly ended in acts of violence. Not only English wool but finished cloth was exported through the Hansa, who controlled the trade in English cloth-making centres.
Trade conflicts
After the treaty of Stralsund the Hansards drove out rival merchants from Scania. English traders were arrested and their goods confiscated. The English king imposed new tonnage and poundage in 1371/72, that covered Hanseatic goods too. The Hanseatic towns and traders thought it violated their privileges. At the same time English traders entered the Baltic and especially Prussian trade, demanding equal reciprocal trading rights. A trade conflict began in 1385 when an English privateer fleet seized a number of Hanseatic ships near Bruges in the Zwin. Some ship were Prussian and the grandmaster of the Teutonic Order confiscated English goods. Richard II retaliated and confiscated Prussian goods in England to compensate the English merchants. When negotiations failed, the grandmaster banned English imports and exports of forests to England in 1386. The compromise at the treaty of Marienburg of August 1388 restored trade ties but failed to address the underlying problems. But when a new grand master cancelled the treaty of Marienburg in 1398 after Prussian towns complained, Henry IV did not retaliate and instead reconfirmed the Hanseatic privileges. A second treaty of Marienburg and a treaty between England and the wider Hanseatic League with promises about compensation and protection against pirates were agreed in 1405, followed by treaties in 1408 and 1409. However the underlying problems of tonnage and poundage and the lack of reciprocal rights for English merchants remained.
By 1420 the Hanseatic League's trade in England had decreased in importance. Cologne remained dominant in the Hanseatic trade on England in the 15th century, and Danzig had a dominant role too.
The English Parliament in 1431 increased poundage by half for foreign merchants. In 1434 the Tagfahrt (de) (the Hanse representative body) finally began negotiations and started a blockade at the same time. The conflict was resolved in 1437 with the Second Treaty of London, when Hanseatic privileges were renewed and the new duties were removed. The Teutonic grandmaster did not ratify the treaty, pressed by Danzig, but England still enforced it despite unfulfilled demands for equal privileges for English traders in 1442 and 1446.
Another English attack on Hanseatic ships, this time a Wendish and Prussian salt fleet, in May 1449 led to another crisis. Lübeck instructed German traders to leave England in 1450 and blocked English trade through the Øresund in 1452 by an agreement with Christian I of Denmark. England was weakened after the Hundred Years' War and briefly restored the Hanseatic privileges, though another salt fleet from Lübeck was taken in 1458. Incidents like that kept tensions high.
Anglo-Hanseatic War
Edward IV held the Hanseatic League responsible, when English ships were attacked in the Øresund by Danes in 1468, and German merchants in London were arrested and convicted by the crown council. The Hanseatic cities were open to negotiation but rejected any common Hanseatic liability and called for an embargo against England. The merchants of Cologne were exempted from the ruling and could trade unhindered, which served to foment dissension among Hansards.
Meanwhile Henry VI was put back on the throne in 1470 as part of the Wars of the Roses. Cologne was temporarily excluded from the League and its privileges in April 1471. Edward IV was helped by Hanseatic ships in his landing in May to retake power, but he reaffirmed Cologne's exclusive privileges in July. A war of piracy called the Anglo-Hanseatic War began against England, the main effort came from ships from Danzig, and much of the rest from Lübeck. One of their captains was the famous Paul Beneke, who commanded the formidable Peter von Danzig.
Negotiations began in 1473 and Edward IV was open to make large concessions for peace. Hanseatic demands were very excessive and Edward did not transfer the property of the Steelyard and the outposts in Lynn and Boston to the Hanseatic towns, but they achieved a very favourable peace from the English commissioners in Utrecht in 1474: many regulations from the Second Treaty of London of 1437 were reconfirmed and the demand for reciprocity on behalf of English merchants was dropped, though this result was against the background of the reduction of the Hanseatic trade's importance over the 15th century.
After the Anglo-Hanseatic War
In 1475 the Hanseatic League purchased the London site outright and it became universally known as the Steelyard. The kontor then required that Hansards lived on the Steelyard. In exchange for the privileges the German merchants had to maintain Bishopsgate, one of the originally seven gates of the city, from where the roads led to their interests in Boston and Lynn.