Shetland and the Hanseatic League

By Brian Smith and Jonathan Wills

 

The Hansa

Seven centuries ago, an influential group of merchants spread throughout northern Europe.  Their ships fared from London in the west through Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck to Novgorod in the east.  In the 13th century, these traders became known simply as “The Association” – The Hansa.

 

Hansa members spoke a common language, and cooperated instead of competing with each other.  Their trading posts, known as kontors, soon came to control the north European economy.

 

At the height of the Hansa’s success, at the end of the 14th century, it comprised 200 towns from the Zyder Zee to the Gulf of Finland, and from Thuringia to Norway.  Hansa merchants reached southern Germany, Italy and the Atlantic ports of France, Spain and Portugal.  They were a political as well as an economic force.

 

The Heyday of the Hansa

The trade of Shetland, on the western fringes of the Hanseatic world, was monopolised by the Bergen kontor from which the Hansa controlled Norway. In 1284, after some Norwegians had attacked one of their ships, they retaliated with a blockade, banning the export to Norway of grain, flour, vegetables and beer. As a result there was widespread famine. The Norwegians were forced to sign a humiliating treaty, giving the Hansa extensive privileges.

 

Bergen then became the centre for all trade from the Norwegian dominions, including Shetland, which from 1195 to 1469 was ruled directly from Norway.  In 1316 a prominent Shetlander was elected to a special committee to regulate imports.

 

The Shetland Germans

From the 15th century onwards, the Hansa began to falter until, in 1669, the Hanseatic Council met for the last time.  One result of the decline was a new relationship between the German merchants and Shetland.

 

Merchants began to chafe at the old restrictions channelling all the Shetland trade through Bergen, and the Hansa records referred to “illegal” voyages direct from Germany to the islands.

 

For more than a hundred years the Hansa issued decrees forbidding this trade with Shetland, threatening expulsion from the Hansa or confiscation of ships and goods, but without effect.  As the Hansa’s central organisation slowly broke down, small groups of Germans began to make an annual trip to Shetland, to trade directly with the islanders.

 

This new trade flourished for three centuries and outlived the Hansa itself.

 

The German traders sailed for Shetland in early spring.  Their voyage lasted two or three weeks. They took salt, for the fish that they hoped to buy, and throughout the summer they lay at anchorages all around the islands, trading with the Shetlanders.  They sailed for home in August or September.  Their ships were small, the size of a modern fishing boat, and carried from six to 18 crew, who made up a “maschup” – a tightly knit little trading firm whose members were often relatives.

 

How large was the Shetland trade?  In 1539 more than 20 per cent of the “stockfish” (dried, salted ling and cod) declared to the customs at Bremen came from Shetland.  In the 16th century, Shetland probably provided about 10% of the international trade in this important and easily-stored winter food.

 

The Detken Family

Some of the German merchants spent half their adult lives in Shetland.  At least one is buried here, in the graveyard at Lund in Unst – the Bremen merchant Segebad Detken.

 

Segebad probably began to sail to Shetland in 1521.  According to his tombstone he had “carried on his business in the country for 52 years” when he died in 1573.

 

Segebad’s long career in Shetland had its exciting moments.  In June 1566 he was trading at Uyeasound in Unst when a pirate broke into his booth and carried off corn, beer and some ship materials.  “As though this outrage was not enough” Segebad wrote, “another gang of the same sort appeared, and poured upward of one hundred rounds of shot into our ships, so that it appeared all but over with us”

 

But Segebad lived to a ripe old age in Shetland, and the Detkens’ Unst connection survived his death.  Next season his sons returned to the island, carrying the elaborately carved stone for their father’s grave, and for another century they and their descendants traded in Shetland.

 

Fish, Bread, Hooks and Soap

For 300 years the German merchants dominated Shetland’s trade.  There were a few Scots and English merchants here, and also some trade with Norway and the Dutch fishermen in the 17th century, but all this was small dealing compared with the German merchants’ activities in every corner of the island.

 

To keep the Shetlanders’ business, the German merchants used an old trick: they gave customers a year’s credit, on condition that they would sell their wares to them, and them alone, the following year.  So the Shetlanders were always in debt, and there was no chance of a local merchant class emerging to compete with the Germans.

 

Shetland’s main export was dried and salted ling.  The Germans probably bought 500 tons of it here every year.  They also bought from the Shetland landlords the butter, cloth and fish oil in which the Shetlanders paid their rents and taxes.

 

In return the merchants brought to Shetland:

• Fishing gear (hooks, lines ropes, tar and salt)
• Food and drink (rye meal, wheat flour, bread, mead, beer and spirits)
• Household goods (linen cloth, muslin, soap and ironmongery)
• Money

 

Lawful weights and measures

All this may suggest that the German merchants had the people of Shetland very much under their thumbs.  But in the 16th century, local government in Shetland was very strong and trade was tightly controlled.

 

Before a German merchant could trade in Shetland he had to have a licence, signed by the governor of the islands.  One such licence is preserved in the Bremen archives.  It permits Johan Kordes “to lie in the port and sound of Balta in Unst, with his ship and goods in the year of God 1560”.  And he also had to pay tolls for his trading privileges.

 

The local courts also dealt with merchants who tried to cheat the Shetlanders.  In June 1603 the court of Yell commanded the German merchants at Burravoe to keep lawful weights and measures ‘under the pain of confiscation of their ship and goods’.  Prices were controlled as well: in the 16th century the Shetlanders believed that commodities had ‘just’ prices, which no-one was entitled to alter.

 

Unscrupulous merchants could abuse the system, but it survived from the 15th century to 1700, and the Shetlanders and Germans often dealt amicably together.

 

There seem to have been no serious language problems.  There is evidence of small kindnesses and personal friendships between the two peoples.  Before he left Shetland in the late 17th century, Adolf Westermann of Hamburg gave a bell to the kirk of Papa Stour, and at least one inhabitant of Northmavine parish called his son Adolf in memory of a good friend.

 

The end of the German Trade

From about 1660 the idea spread in Scotland that too much trade was in the hands of foreigners, and that they should be kept out. This idea was extremely alarming to Shetlanders.  There were no local merchants to do the job that the Germans had been doing for so long.  There wasn’t even a town.  When the Scottish parliament tried to ban the German merchants from Shetland in 1661, the Shetland landlords protested, and won their case.

 

But big changes were coming: the local government of the islands had largely ceased to exist.  Local landowners were taking more of the initiative.  Some of them forced their tenants to fish for this or that German merchant under pain of eviction.  In return the Germans paid the landlords a fee for their cooperation.

 

War, Famine and Disease

Then, at the very end of the 17th century, Germans and Shetlanders alike were hit by a series of crises.

 

The most vivid description of those terrible years was written by 10 Shetland landowners who briefed the king’s council in 1696, during the English-French wars, which lasted from 1689 to 1713 and affected Shetland severely. French privateers harassed the islands year after year.  Their first victim was Adolf Westermann, whom they captured in his booth at Hillswick.

 

In 1693 French pirates fell on the Out Skerries, killed all the cattle and sheep, ransacked the houses and plundered the Hamburg merchant there.  Three years later they seized £200 worth of goods – a massive sum – from Claus Hill, at anchor in Burravoe in Yell.  They went north to Cullivoe and Uyeasound and plundered Herman Bardewis and Claus Derick.

 

The Shetland landowners were terrified.  “The German merchants,” they wrote, “are so broken and discouraged that it is to be feared none of them will again return during the war.  If it be so, there is no possibility of livelihood for any in this place”.

 

Things got even worse: the 1690s saw cold summers and famine.  Then came a devastating outbreak of small pox.  Hundreds of Shetlanders died.

 

The impoverished islands had far less butter and fish than usual to barter with the Germans, some of whom gave up Shetland for a bad job.  But at the beginning of the 18th century about seven German ships were still voyaging here.  It was to take a determined effort by the new British authorities to expel them forever.

 

 “And now I am turned out”

The last nail in the coffin of the German trade with Shetland was the Act of Union between the parliaments of Scotland and England.  In 1707, English laws forbidding the import of salt by foreigners came into force in Shetland.

 

In 1709 the justice of the peace in Shetland told the customs commissioners in Edinburgh that “since the Union the few Hamburgers and Bremeners that used to come to Shetland are now so discouraged by the great alteration of their customs duty that they have all given over their former trading”.

 

On 5 October 1712 John Otto Bossau, who had had a booth at Hillswick, wrote as follows from his chamber in Hamburg to the Earl of Morton.

 

“I have been dealing to Shetland these 15 or 16 years”, he said, “and never had less than three or four ships loading from thence.  I have trusted above £500 every year to the people.  I paid all their duties for them, and if they could pay me it was well; if not I trusted them, which perhaps others would not do.  And now I am turned out”.