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

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the ‘draperies’ or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic League as the major vehicle in marketing their textiles. In several previous articles, I had examined the major factors that had led to the industrial and commercial reorientations of the these cloth industries during the 14th and 15th centuries. In brief, the spreading stain of widespread warfare, piracy, and general insecurity, especially in the Mediterranean basin, from the 1290s (to the 1460s), led to a rise in transport and transaction costs that, in turn, had three major consequences for the Low Countries’ and England’s textile-based economies: (1) to cripple the export-oriented production of the very cheap and light fabrics, most of which had been sent to Mediterranean markets and had comprised the bulk of northern textile shipments to this region; (2) to encourage most draperies in the Low Countries and England to re-orient their export-oriented cloth production more and more towards high-priced ultra-luxury quality woollens, woven almost exclusively from the finer English wools, but wools that came to be burdened with high export taxes; and (3) to force these northern cloth industries, facing increasing difficulties in Mediterranean commerce, to become far more dependent on Hanseatic merchants and German towns for their cloth sales, certainly by the mid-14th century. But in effecting these industrial and commercial orientations, the Low Countries’ draperies encountered a new and even more dangerous challenge from expanding English competition in textiles, which enjoyed the signal advantage of control over high quality wools, which, for the domestic cloth industry, were tax-free and much cheaper. Nevertheless, for reasons outlined in this and earlier papers, the English took well more than a century to achieve final ...