The Merchant Adventurers at Hamburg

Abstract

THE imperial city of Hamburg was for nearly two hundred years the principal seaport on the cotntinent to which the Merchant Adventurers of England traded, the mart-town in which the society stapled the great woolen manufacture of England. The relations between the Adventurers Company and the city were formally established in i 567, and with one important exception continued down to the dissolution of the society at Hamburg in the nineteenth century. During this time the Adventurers frequenting the Hamburg marts were fully organized in accordance with their constitution and charter. At first they formed a local or subsidiary courtonly, but later, when the religious disturbances in the Netherlands brought about the decline in trade to those parts, and a consequent increase in the Hamburg trade, the general court of the fellowship was also transferred thither. The story of the Merchant Adventurers at Hamburg is therefore of importance, first, because it affords a study of a phase of English commercial life as it worked itself out through the medium of a medieval trading fraternity; second, because it throws much light on the character and organization of the society; and third, because it witnesses the scene of its final dissol ution. The first regular commercial relations based upon mutual agreement between the Company of Merchant Adventurers and the city of Hamburg lasted over a period of ten years, from i 567 to I 577. This part of the society's history has been treated by Dr. Ehrenberg in an exhaustive study which has given rise to considerable discussion.2 But the much longer and more important period of the Adventurers' history at Hamburg, which began in i6 i and continued without interruption into the early part of the nineteenth century, has not been treated, except in parts by local historians of Hamburg, especially by that careful student of Hanseatic history, Dr. Lappenberg. Of the sources that serve as a basis for the present study there are a number that have a peculiar interest. They emanate directly from the Merchant Adventurers themselves and represent a few im-