History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 170

The Channel was infested with pirates, and the mouth of the Rhine, Calais, and St.
Malo are mentioned at different times as being their chief haunts. A very powerful
association of pirates was allowed to ravage the North Sea and the Baltic. The
Hanseatic League had availed themselves of the dangerous aid of these freebooters
during their struggle with the king of Denmark, which was closed by the Treaty of
Stralsund in 1370. They were not immediately able to put down the evil which they
had allowed to spread, though the great organization of pirates known as the ‘Victual
Brothers’ was broken up after their defeat off Heligoland in 1402. These pirates had
burnt Bergen in 1392, and under their leaders Stortebeker and Michelson had devoted
themselves especially to preying on merchants who frequented English ports. When
the Victual Brothers had been crushed the evil scarcely abated, for several small nests
of pirates were formed out of the survivors of the great association, and their ravages
by sea and land were so bold that at length the men of Amsterdam were moved to
take the matter in hand, and in 1408 entered into a league with Hamburg, Lübeck, and
other towns for the extirpation of the evil. They were successful in destroying nine of
the haunts of the pirates at the mouth of the Ems, but little permanent good was done.
A celebrated pirate named Voet, who was acting in the interest and possibly with the
connivance of the Hanseatic League, sacked Bergen in 1428, and this was a serious
blow to English trade in the North Sea.
Similar evils occurred nearer home, and there were pitiful complaints of the attacks of
bands of outlaws known as the ‘Rovers of the Sea’, who pillaged the coasts in the time
of Henry VI. It is only by an examination of the separate histories of different localities
that we get any real idea of the frightful extent of the evil along the coasts. Agnes
Paston writes in 1450, as of an everyday event, of a neighbour ‘who was taken
with enemies, walking by the sea-coast’. The marauders seem to have kidnapped old
and young; and we can well believe that rural districts like the neighbourhood of
Paston had cause for alarm, when towns like Sandwich and Southampton were burnt,
and London and Norwich were forced to plan means of defence with booms and
chains. Englishmen on their part were not innocent; the people of Westeigi and Esteigi
in Friesland petitioned the English king to restrain the Captain of Calais from sending
the pirates he kept in his pay against their ships.
As in the earlier period, the simplest means of granting some redress was to allow the
aggrieved party to seize the goods in England or on the seas of men who hailed from
the same town or district as the pirates, in the hope that the penalty would at last fall
upon the right shoulders. When piracy was carried on on an extensive scale, however,
this was useless. The task of getting redress then passed into the hands of the Crown;
thus protracted negotiations began with the Hanse in 1403 over the matter of
privateering; the Livonians put in a claim for the loss of three ships and 250 men
drowned, while claims were also entered by Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Stralsund,
Greifswald, and Kampen; counter-claims against Wismar and Rostock came from
London, Newcastle, Hull, York, Colchester, Norwich, Yarmouth, Clee, Wiveton, and
Lynn; Lynn claimed also restitution for goods and houses lost and for ransoms
extorted at the sack of Bergen by corsairs from Wismar and Rostock.
In the modern period we get the separation of the peaceful trader from the pirate and
buccaneer. The pirate becomes an outlaw with the hands of all traders and
governments against him. At times, however, the dividing line between the privateer or

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