History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 136

had decisions in their favour in 1630 and 1637, they were hard hit by the prohibition of
the export of wool to the Low Countries in 1618, and some years later, when they had
built up an export trade in coarse cloth to Holland, the passing of the Navigation Act of
1651 ruined it.
Persistent English privateering and the Navigation Act of 1563 caused a stoppage of
trade in the next year, and the breach was never really healed. The Adventurers were
driven from Antwerp, but were invited to settle in Hamburg and Emden. They chose
Emden, but found a very inadequate sale for their cloth; so they changed their
quarters, first to Cologne and then to Frankfort, where they came into touch with the
merchants whom they used to meet in Antwerp. A second stoppage followed in 1568,
and the goods of the Adventurers and Staplers in the Low Countries were arrested.
This trade was never recovered in Elizabeth's reign, and Antwerp was finally closed to
the Adventurers in 1575; but by that time many English merchants as well as the
Adventurers had made their way to south Germany. The opening of new markets to
free enterprise was the last thing the Company wanted. They tried to control the
German trade from their station at Hamburg and, when the breach with the Hanseatic
League drove them from that town, from Stade on the other side of the Elbe. The main
stream of trade never afterwards reverted to the old Netherlands channel, and when
the Hansa had withdrawn from active trade with England, the whole of the intercourse
between England and the valleys of the Rhine and Elbe came under the control of the
Adventurers. The Company remained prominent and active until the 18th century.
3. 8.
English merchants in Prussia and the Hansa towns found themselves exposed to loss
and at a disadvantage because there was no proper authority to regulate their affairs
and to settle disputes among them. They elected a governor whose authority was
confirmed by Richard II in 1391; later Henry IV empowered the merchants trading in
those parts to meet together and elect governors who should not only have authority
in quarrels but should have power to arrange disputes between English and foreign
merchants, and to secure redress for any injury that might be done them in foreign
parts. This was in 1404, and similar privileges were afterwards granted to the English
merchants of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
In the north Englishmen were now pushing their trade to such an extent that they were
brought into difficulties with more than one power. At the beginning of the 15th
century, the Hansards found their monopoly of the Baltic trade threatened by the
dominance of the Danes in the Scandinavian peninsula. On the whole, the English
gained in this struggle between the Danes and the Hansards, for they were enabled to
open up communications with Prussia. Even amid the concessions to the Hansa
granted by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1474, the right of the English to trade in the Baltic
was not given up; indeed, the position of the Eastland merchants who traded to
Prussia was on paper made more secure, though it does not appear that they gained
much in practice.
In the 16th century a movement was set on foot by the London merchants to establish
the Baltic trade after the manner of organization of the Merchant Adventurers. This
trade had been open to all Englishmen and had been as great a resource to the free
traders of the east coast as the Spanish trade had been to those of the west and
south. It was henceforth to be restricted to the members of a new corporation, the
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