rowth, was the settlement of
foreign merchants, who, at first as individuals, and later under the
control of the Hanseatic League, made it one of the principal trading
centres of Northern Europe; and no account of mediaeval London would be
complete which omitted a reference to the part played by these German
and Flemish adventurers. Although it was not until the middle of the
twelfth century that the League reached that complete organization which
made it for some centuries a great northern power, the trading
communities of Germany early acquired some sort of cohesion; and we find
them established in London as early as the reign of Ethelred II. The
encouragement this Saxon King afforded them was doubtless due to the
fact that they were able to offer him the money of which he always stood
in need, in return for the privileges he was able to confer on them; and
he may have felt that he could always rely on their active support
against their common enemy--the Danes. But these first merchants were
few and unorganized, and although as time went on they increased in
number and importance, it was not until the League itself had become a
power that, in the reign of Henry III., they obtained a recognized
corporate existence.

The foundations of this originally peaceful confederacy were, curiously
enough, laid in war, and that of the baser sort--war for the sake of
pillage. The Vikings, finding themselves unable to realize the spoil
with which they were sometimes gorged, conceived the idea of founding a
market-place to which, by assurances of safety and immunity from further
theft, they could induce peaceful merchants to attend and receive, and
pay for, the goods which they had stolen. Such was the now vanished town
of Jomsborg which Palnatoki, the Jarl of Fjon, founded about 950 in the
country of the Wends, near the mouth of the Oder. This town was intended
to be an abode of peace, where not only could the merchants reside in
safety, but to which the Viking Jarls, fighting elsewhere between
themselves, might resort to exchange the results of their raids. And
this city gradually became not only the market for the goods which the
sea-rovers gathered from sacked cities and ruined monasteries, but also
the emporium of the merchandise of the East, which reached the Baltic
from Byzantium by the Euxine and the Dnieper. It was in this Viking
market town that the first German merchants established among themselves
that association which