Munich Personal RePEc Archive Hanseatic commerce in textiles from the Low Countries and England during the Later Middle Ages: changing trends in textiles, markets, prices, and values, 1290 - 1570 Munro, John H. Department of Economics, University of Toronto December 2007 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/11199/ MPRA Paper No. 11199, posted 21 Oct 2008 04:53 UTC Sonderdruck aus: Marie-Luise Heckmann / Jens Röhrkasten (Hg.) Von Nowgorod bis London Studien zu Handel, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im mittelalterlichen Europa Festschrift für Stuart Jenks zum 60. Geburtstag September 2008, ISBN 978-3-89971-446-3 V&R unipress Inhalt Abbildungen, Figures, Tabellen und Tables …………….…………………….… 5 Abkürzungen ……………………………………..……………………………… 9 KOMMUNIKATION UND MEDIEN DIETRICH KURZE Neujahrslied und Neujahrspredigt im 15. Jahrhundert …………………………. 13 VOLKER HENN Eine unbeachtete Brügger Kontorordnung aus dem 15. Jahrhundert ……..……. 31 KERSTIN RAS-DÜRSCHNER Mittelalter im Museum – Anmerkungen aus der museumspädagogischen Praxis ………………………………………………………………..…………………. 51 PATRICK SAHLE eScience History? ................................................................................................. 63 WIRTSCHAFT UND GESELLSCHAFT JÜRGEN SARNOWSKY Am Anfang einer »wirtschaftlichen Revolution«. Privilegien und Handel im Ober- italien der Ottonenzeit ……………………..…………………………………… 77 1 Inhalt JOHN H. MUNRO Hanseatic Commerce in Textiles from the Low Countries and England during the Later Middle Ages: Changing Trends in Textiles, Markets, Prices, and Values, 1290–1570 ..…………………………………………………………………….. 97 HERMAN VAN DER WEE Labour in late medieval and early modern Antwerp …………….……………. 183 ASTRID SCHMIDT-HÄNDEL Landtransport im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit am Beispiel des Er- furter Waidhandels ……………………………………………….………...…. 197 ROLF HAMMEL-KIESOW Schriftlichkeit und Handelsgesellschaften niederdeutsch-hansischer und oberdeut- scher Kaufleute im späten 13. und im 14. Jahrhundert ……………..………… 213 MATTHIAS PUHLE Magdeburg und die Hanse im Mittelalter ………………………….………….. 243 MARIE-LUISE HECKMANN Zwischen Weichseldelta, Großer Wildnis und Rigaischem Meerbusen. Ökolo- gische Voraussetzungen für die Landnahme im spätmittelalterlichen Baltikum …………………………………………………………………………………. 255 CHRISTINA LINK Stetig und genau oder lückenhaft und uneinheitlich? Die Rechnungsführung der Marienburger Großschäfferei des Deutschen Ordens in Preußen …………….. 297 DIETER HECKMANN Süßwasserfische als Vorrats- und Handelsgut im spätmittelalterlichen Preußen …………………………………………………………………………………. 317 2 Inhalt DAS EIGENE UND DAS FREMDE DAVID D’AVRAY Roman Law and Canon Law: Medieval England and Germany in Weber’s Wirt- schaft und Gesellschaft ……………………………………………...………… 343 JULIA WALWORTH Als uns allen ist erkant: England as presented in the literary narratives of Rudolf von Ems ……………………………………………………………………….. 359 PAUL BRAND Law-making in England in the reign of Henry III: The case of the legislation made at Hailes in November 1251 ………..…………………………………………. 373 JENS RÖHRKASTEN The Role of Minor Freeholders in the General Eyre in Thirteenth-Century England ….………………………………......………………………………………….. 387 HENRY SUMMERSON Foreigners and Felony: aliens as perpetrators and victims of crime in London, 1272–1327 …..………………………………………………………………… 409 HERBERT EIDEN The Social Ideology of the rebels in Suffolk and Norfolk in 1381 …………… 425 JOHN LANGDON Technology, Labour Opportunity and Inventive Thinking in Medieval England ……………………………………………………………………………….... 441 MARYANNE KOWALESKI Shipping and the Carrying Trade in Medieval Dartmouth ……………………. 465 3 Inhalt NIKOLAS JASPERT Dem Reich verbunden: Gemeinschaftsbildung und Frömmigkeit deutscher Kauf- leute und Handwerker in Lyon (um 1500) ……………………………………. 489 ANHANG Schriftenverzeichnis von STUART JENKS ……………………………………… 515 Autoren und Herausgeber ……………………………………………………... 523 Personen- und Ortsverzeichnis ………………………..…………..…………. 527 4 John H. Munro Hanseatic Commerce in Textiles from the Low Countries and England during the Later Middle Ages: Changing Trends in Textiles, Markets, Prices, and Values, 1290–1570 anntrie Late-Medieval German Commerce in Woollens from the Low Countries and England Of all the manufactured commodities entering into German Hanseatic com- merce during the later medieval era, none was more important than woollen cloth. Ultimately, by the late 15th century, for reasons now well known, English woollen broadcloths and kerseys had gained an overwhelming ascendancy in German, Central and Eastern European markets; and merchants of the Cologne-led Rhenish Hanse in particular had played an important role in helping the English cloth trade achieve its most decisive breakthrough: that based upon Antwerp and the Brabant Fairs, from the 1420s1. Prior to that commercial breakthrough, however, the draperies of the Low Countries had enjoyed pre-eminence in German textile markets, chiefly thanks to the loyalty of other groups of Hanseatic merchants from the Baltic-based Wen- dish, Prussian, and Livonian leagues. For they had rightly deemed the trade in Flemish, Brabantine, and then Dutch woollens to be a vital component of their long-held commercial hegemony in the Low Countries’ populous and generally lucrative markets. Indeed many of them retained that loyalty long after compara- 1 John H. MUNRO, Patterns of Trade, Money, and Credit, in: Handbook of European His- tory, 1400–1600. Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, 1: Structures and Assertions, ed. Thomas A. BRADY, jr., Heiko O. OBERMAN, James D. TRACY, Leiden, New York, Cologne 1994, pp. 147–149; IDEM, Textiles, Towns, and Trade. Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries (Variorum Collected Studies series, CS 442), Aldershot, Brookfield/Vt. 1994; IDEM, Anglo-Fle- mish Competition in the International Cloth Trade, 1340–1520, in: L’Angleterre et les Pays Bas bourguignonnes. Relations et comparaisons, XVe-XVIe siècle, ed. Jean-Marie CAUCHIES (Publication du Centre Européen d’Etudes Bourguignonnes, 35), Neuchâtel 1995, pp. 37–60; IDEM, The Symbiosis of Towns and Textiles. Urban Institutions and the Changing Fortunes of Cloth Manufacturing in the Low Countries and England, 1270–1570, in: Journal of Early Modern History. Contacts, Comparisons, Contrasts 3 (1999), pp. 1–74; IDEM, Textiles as Articles of Consumption in Flemish Towns, 1330 to 1575, in: Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis 81 (1998), pp. 275–288. 97 John H. Munro tive advantages in both production and trade had shifted from the Low Countries to England, whose consequences can be seen in Tables 1 and 2 (in the Appendix). They clearly demonstrate both the expansion in English cloth exports, in which the Hanseatic share continued to rise (to almost 30 percent) until the 1490s, and also the stark decline in the Flemish-Brabantine cloth production indices, espe- cially from the 1430s. If these long-standing ties of mutual dependence in Flemish-Hanseatic trade did not prevent but merely postponed the inevitable demise of the traditional urban draperies of the southern Low Countries, these Hanseatic ties had nevertheless proved to be much more effective in rescuing the fortunes of the Flemish and Bra- bantine urban cloth industries much earlier, in the early to mid-14th century, well before the rise of English competition (and also before the rise of the Dutch cloth industry). For, during the very late 13th and early 14th century, the spreading stain of chaotic European warfare had deprived most draperies, in not only the Low Countries, but also in England and northern France, of their major and most im- portant markets: in the densely populated, highly urbanized Mediterranean basin. As I have sought to demonstrate in other publications, the consequences of that chronic warfare, in steeply rising transportation and transaction costs for north- west Europe’s long-distance trade in textiles with the Mediterranean basin during the early 14th century, were fourfold2. The first was to cripple, or virtually to cripple, the export-oriented production of the very cheap and light fabrics that had comprised the bulk of northern textile shipments to this region. Of the northern producers of cheap says, worsteds, and other draps légers, so prominent in the 13th century, only Arras and Hondschoote survived, almost totally restricted to northern markets. The second was, therefore, to encourage most draperies in the Low Countries, northern France, and England to shift their export-oriented cloth production more and more towards high-priced ultra-luxury quality woollens. Their far higher values allowed such cloth-exporters greater success in sustain- ingrising transportation and transaction costs, all the more so since luxury 2 See sources in n. 1, and also John MUNRO, Industrial Transformations in the North-West European Textile Trades, c. 1290-c. 1340. Economic Progress or Economic Crisis?, in: Before the Black Death. Studies in the ›Crisis‹ of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. Bruce M.S. CAMPBELL, Manchester, New York 1991, pp. 110–148, repr. in: MUNRO, Textiles, Towns and Trade (see note 1), no 8; IDEM, The Origins of the English ›New Draperies‹. The Resurrection of an Old Flemish Industry, 1270–1570, in: The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300–1800, ed. Negley B. HARTE (Pasold Studies in Textile History 10), Oxford, New York 1997, pp. 35–127; IDEM, The ›Indu- strial Crisis‹ of the English Textile Towns, 1290–1330, in: Thirteenth-Century England, 7, ed. Michael PRESTWICH, Richard BRITNELL, Robin FRAME, Woodbridge/UK