What Moved

Herring and the salt that moved it

In late summer the herring came into the sound between Zealand and Scania, and for a few weeks the beaches below Skanør and Falsterbo became the place where the northern fish trade happened. The run was short and it was the whole business. A herring is an oily fish that begins to spoil within hours of leaving the water, and a catch left overnight on warm sand was worth nothing by morning. So the work was done where the boats landed. The fish were gutted, layered into barrels with salt, sealed and marked, and what went aboard in autumn could be broken open inland at Lent. Everything the trade needed had to be standing on the sand before the first boat came in, because once the run started there was no time to send for anything.

The other end of the trade was Lüneburg, where brine was raised and boiled on a scale nothing else in the north matched. The salt went by cart to Lübeck and by ship from there to the Danish shore, and it had to be lying on the beach before the fish arrived, in the quantity the season would need, which nobody could know in advance. A shortfall could not be made good inside the season: Lüneburg was weeks away. Salt was part of the fishery's plant, as much as the barrels and the men who made them. Without it the run fed Scania and nothing else happened.

Between those two ends the towns built an apparatus on somebody else's coast. Each town with a stake in the fairs held its own Vitte, fenced, with its own bailiff and its own court inside the fence, and within it stood booths, salting benches, cooperages and stacked empty barrels. Barrel sizes were fixed and inspected, because short measure discovered in Cologne in March was a fraud nobody could prosecute on a beach in September. The Danish crown taxed all of it: dues on the ground, the booths, the wagons, the fish.

Taxed at both ends, and still nobody can say how much herring left those beaches in any year of the fourteenth century. Part of the reason is in the taxes themselves: they fell on the ground, the booth and the wagon rather than on the catch, and a receipt for a booth tells you nothing about what was packed inside it. Reconstructions circulate, counted in barrels and in shiploads; the step that turns account entries into barrels is not written down in the work that publishes them, so nothing here is drawn from them. Whether the fairs later failed because the shoals moved is a question of its own, argued in its own piece. What belongs here is the trade while it worked: a season, a preservative, a fenced beach, and no total.

Stockfish

Norway's cod solved the same problem without salt at all. Along the Lofoten islands the winter cod came inshore to spawn, and the catch was split, tied in pairs and hung over wooden racks in air that was cold, dry and moving. The fish lost most of its weight to that air and hardened until it had to be beaten with a mallet before it could be cooked. Then it kept for years. No brine, no barrel, no cooper, no input shipped in from anywhere: the weather did in the north what Lüneburg did in the south. What came off the racks was light for its value and indifferent to a delayed sailing, and it would travel as far as anyone cared to carry it.

All of it went through one town. The northern catch was funnelled down the coast to Bergen and sold there, and the German merchants resident at Bergen bought it, victualled the north in return, and held that position for centuries. What their kontor was as a governing body comes later in this series; here Bergen is the place a cargo had to pass.

Stockfish is also the best-evidenced cargo in the system, and the evidence for it is English. In the English customs accounts of 1303–11, stockfish is about 82 per cent [M] of the recorded value of everything arriving from Norway. But a share is not a quantity, and getting one out of it takes a reconstruction. England took something like 1,500 to 2,000 tonnes a year in those same years [E], and roughly 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes left Norway altogether once you assume the continent took as much as England did, an assumption the historian who published it calls an educated guess [E]. In the last decades of the fourteenth century the trade runs at half that or less, and it passes 4,500 tonnes a year again at the very end of the sixteenth, in 1597–99 [E].

Closer in, the record sharpens and stops sooner. Boston's imports from Bergen averaged about £6,113 a year between 1365 and 1400 [M], a maximum figure taken off rolls that survive in fragments, worth perhaps 378 tonnes of fish [E]. Nine ships itemised in 1388 and 1390/91 give stockfish as 91 per cent of the cargo value, £4,384 15s out of £4,842 4s [M], counted down to the shilling.

That is the strongest quantitative case in the whole Hanseatic record, and it consists of two different things. The share was written down at the time. The tonnage was worked out from it, much later, by historians who had to assume a price and a weight to do it.

Grain

Rye grew on estates in the Polish interior, out of sight of any sea. It came down the Vistula on flat barges in the hands of raftsmen who ran the river as a trade of their own, and it arrived at Danzig, which had the legal right to stop it. That right is a staple: the power of a town to have goods passing through it unloaded and offered on its own market before they may go on. Every barge had to break bulk where the town said, in front of the town's own buyers, which is how a place that grew no grain of its own became the price-setter for other people's. Danzig also charged every ship that lay at the piles along its harbour front, and the books its clerks kept of that due, the Pfahlgeld, are most of what can now be seen of its traffic.

What the clerks were counting is where the difficulty starts. Grain was reckoned in lasts, a bulk measure whose real size depended on the commodity in the hold and on the port doing the measuring, and the same rye could also be counted in wispel, the dry measure of the northern towns, and in a scatter of other local units besides. One heap of grain was therefore one number at Danzig and another at Amsterdam, and every tonnage ever built out of those numbers is a tonnage plus a decision about which convention to use. Nobody was being careless. A measure was a local instrument, kept in the local town hall, and it worked perfectly for people trading inside one market. It becomes a problem only when somebody centuries later wants a series out of it.

Danzig's rye exports have been put at about 10,000 lasts in the 1490s [M], and are said to have quintupled over the sixteenth century. Both halves of that sentence want holding at arm's length. The 1490s figure is a snapshot lifted from the harbour-due books, not a point on a trend, and the historian who worked through the surviving fifteenth-century Danzig samples found no continuous expansion in them at all. Both ends are stated here and no line is drawn between them. The wider claim is firmer: Danzig controlled as much as 75 per cent [M] of the total Baltic grain exports.

The peak comes long after the League's best years. In 1618 Danzig registered 118,000 Gdańsk lasts [M], which is about 271,000 tonnes if the Gdańsk rye last is taken at 2.2 to 2.3 tonnes and appreciably less if it is taken at the Sound toll's working figure of about two [E].

Rye is the one cargo here that behaves like a series, and the reason sits outside the League altogether. It is countable because the people buying it kept registers year after year, and those people were in Amsterdam and at the Sound. Whether the grain trade that made Danzig rich also made the League unnecessary is a question argued separately.

Wax, furs and the eastern goods

A wax candle burning on an altar in Flanders had most likely begun as honeycomb in a forest east of Novgorod. Churches wanted beeswax and would take almost any quantity of it, because tallow smoked and stank and was not fit for an altar, and the demand followed the calendar of feasts and masses. The wax came out of the Russian forests in weighed and sealed lumps, was traded through Novgorod, and went west.

Wax and furs give the eastern trade its name, and the basket was wider than the name. Squirrel pelts above all, along with marten and other furs; then honey, hides and leather, and flax and hemp followed later. The route ran down the Russian rivers to Novgorod, from Novgorod to Reval and Riga, and from there to Lübeck and on to Bruges, where a Flemish weaver or an Italian factor was waiting at the far end.

These goods make a different kind of entry in a ledger than grain does. Wax and furs were worth a great deal and took up very little room; grain was the reverse. A ship could be full to the deckhead with rye and be carrying less value than a chest of pelts stowed beside it. So a customs record ranked by value and a hull ranked by capacity are two different pictures of the same trade, and a merchant, a toll collector and a shipmaster each cared about a different one. Value and volume are separate outcomes, and running them together is the quickest way to make a trade look bigger or smaller than it was.

For the eastern trade there is no serial record of any kind. The Peterhof at Novgorod left statutes, letters, treaties and a great deal of litigation, and no annual account of goods at all. What survives is an archive of rules and quarrels, which tells you what was supposed to happen and who fell out about it, and never how much went past. What exists in quantity is a scatter of single years reconstructed from other towns' books, and none of that is carried here. The goods that filled the value column left no record of quantity at all.

Cloth, coming the other way

Every ship that took rye or wax west had to come back with something, and what it came back with, overwhelmingly, was cloth. Flemish broadcloth first: heavy woollens woven, fulled and dyed in the towns behind Bruges, sold by the piece, the standard finished good of northern Europe. Cloth suited the return voyage exactly. It was finished, it was durable, it did not spoil on a slow passage, and a hold carrying it home was carrying many times the worth of the same space filled with grain. English cloth took a growing share of the same trade across the fifteenth century, as England moved from selling its wool abroad to selling the cloth made from it at home.

That is the shape of the whole exchange, and it was not a matter of taste. The north and east sold what their land, water and forests yielded — grain, timber, fish, wax, furs — and the west sold labour and skill that somebody had organised into an industry. The two western kontors mattered out of proportion to any tonnage passing through them. Bruges and London sat on the finished side of the exchange, where the margin was and where the credit was arranged. What those two were as governing bodies comes later in this series.

The cloth numbers exist, and they are unusually good: counts by the piece, year after year, with the nationality of the merchant attached. They are also English crown records, kept by customs officers for the king's revenue and by nobody in the Hanse. They belong to England's archive, and nothing from them is quoted here.

So the commodity with the longest run of annual counts anywhere in this story was counted by a foreign government, on its own side of the water, for reasons that had nothing to do with knowing how much cloth the Baltic bought. None of it is Hanseatic bookkeeping. What the Hanse kept about that trade is a record of who was allowed to carry it and on what terms.

Beer as a manufacture

Everything so far was caught, cut or dug. Beer was made.

Hamburg brewed it in quantity and for export, and the thing that made that possible was hops. Unhopped beer soured in the cask and had to be drunk near where it was brewed, which is what kept brewing a local trade. Hops preserve as well as flavour, and a hopped beer could go down the Elbe, across to Amsterdam and inland from there and still be worth opening at the far end. That single change turned a trade that had to stay at home into a cargo, and Hamburg built an industry on it: casks going out to Amsterdam and the Low Countries year on year, and brewers who were a political estate inside the town.

Two things follow. Brewing put a claim on the same rye that was coming down the Vistula, so the beer trade and the grain trade were one trade seen from two ends, and a bad harvest in Poland was a problem in a Hamburg cellar. And a brewing town had a constituency that a transit port did not: men with capital sunk in coppers and vats, whose interest in what the council decided about grain prices and tolls was immediate and permanent.

The most informative surviving document about any of this is a survey of Hamburg's occupations that no longer exists. The original burned in the Hamburg archive fire of 1842 [M]. What survives is a nineteenth-century transcription, which is to say a copy nobody can now check against the thing it was copied from. A transcription is evidence, and it is evidence of a different kind: everything the survey now says rests on the care of one copyist. The best evidence for the one cargo in all this that was made rather than caught is testimony about a document.

Why we can see one year and not the next

If the counting is this thin, how does anybody write about Hanseatic trade at all? Because there are two archives and only one of them is thin. Charters, statutes, privileges, diet recesses, court rolls and merchants' letters survive in bulk, and out of them you can reconstruct how the trade was organised in fine detail. What survives badly is the arithmetic.

The towns counted cargo when they had voted a war tax and needed to know what to collect, and they stopped when the war was paid for. Their own best books are a handful of years hung on emergencies. The long continuous series were kept by people with a standing reason to count year after year: an English king taxing his ports, a Danish king taxing a strait.

The years themselves make the point [CR]. English enrolled customs run from 1279–80 onward, with the detailed particulars surviving unevenly from the late thirteenth century into the sixteenth. The Danish toll at the Sound survives from 1497, becomes near-continuous from 1574, and gives a destination city you can rely on only from 1668. Against that: Lübeck's pound-toll year of 18 March 1368 to 10 March 1369, and its books for 1368–71 and 1492–96; Hamburg's for 1369, 1399–1400 and 1418; Danzig's for 1409 and 1411, and its Pfahlgeld books for 1468, 1469 and 1498; and Bergen's own court books, which begin in 1633 and are therefore no help with any of this.

A cross-section is not a trend, and before 1500 there is no continuous city-by-commodity record anywhere in the Baltic. Any curve drawn across those gaps was drawn by somebody. Inside a good year the unit is still a problem: a last is not a fixed quantity, a wispel is not a last, and a sum in marks lübisch is a sum in a money of account, which is taken up further on.

One figure is worth walking through, because the walk is the method. A number in wide circulation puts Danzig's grain exports at 80,000 lasts in 1567. Go back to the source everyone citing it is ultimately citing, and 80,000 lasts in 1567 is there, attached to something else: it is the carrying capacity of Holland's merchant fleet. Dutch imports of Baltic grain in the same year are a different and smaller number on the same page, and the appendix carries both. Nothing was falsified to produce the mistake. A figure was lifted off the wrong line, and it has been travelling ever since.

Which is what the labels beside the numbers on this page are for: to tell you, where you meet a figure, whether somebody counted it or somebody worked it out.