The Steelyard, from the Middle Low German (sample yard), was the kontor of the Hanseatic League in London, and their main trading base in England, from the 13th and 16th centuries. The main goods that the League exported from London were wool and from the 14th century woollen cloths. An important import good was beeswax. The kontor tended to be dominated by Rhenish and Westphalian traders, especially from Cologne.
The Steelyard was not the only Hanseatic trading post in England. There were a number of Hanseatic factories on the English east coast, like the remaining Hanseatic warehouse in King's Lynn, Norfolk.
Name
The Middle Low German name Stâlhof is the older one, appearing as early as 1320. The name seems to indicate the practice of tagging inspected wool with a lead mark.
Kingsford traces the first reference to it as the Steelyard to 1382. A Latin quotation from 1394 has: In civitate Londonia ... in Curia Calibis. Kingsford concludes that Steelyard is a mistaken translation of Stâlhof.
The kontor was also called the Esterlinghall ("Easterling hall") in Middle English, in 1340 for the first time.
Location
The Steelyard was located on the north bank of the Thames by the outflow of the Walbrook, in the Dowgate ward of the City of London. The site is bounded by Cousin Lane on the west, Upper Thames Street on the north, and Allhallows Lane on the east, an area of 5,250 m2 or 1.3 acres. It is now covered by Cannon Street station and commemorated in the names of Steelyard Passage and Hanseatic Walk. The Steelyard, like other Hansa stations, was a separate walled community with its own warehouses on the river, its own weigh house, chapel, counting houses, a guildhall, cloth halls, wine cellars, kitchens, and residential quarters. The kontor could be accessed by sea-going ships.
As a church the Germans used former All-Hallows-the-Great, since there was only a small chapel on their own premises.
In 1988 remains of the former Hanseatic kontor, once the largest medieval trading complex in Britain, were uncovered by archaeologists during maintenance work on Cannon Street Station.
History
Merchants from Cologne bought a building at the corner of Thames Street and Cousin Lane in the 1170s, though they seem to have used it as early as 1157, and it became known as the "Guildhall" (Latin: Gildahalda teutonicorum, Gilda aula). Henry II of England granted very extensive privileges to traders from Cologne in 1175/76 in an attempt to limit the power of Flemish merchants who then controlled the English wool trade. This group from Cologne effectively controlled the trade of Rhine wine and acquired a building called the gildhalla from then on too. They're alluded to in the De itinere navali, an account of crusaders from Lübeck for whom the Kontor arranged the purchase of a replacement cog in the summer of 1189. The privileges of the Guildhall existed alongside individual cities' privileges. Low German traders from the area around the Baltic Sea appeared in England too around this time, but they directed their trade more at English towns up north.
Hanseatic kontor
The merchant communities from Westphalia and the Rhineland and from the Baltic formed a joint venture by the mid 13th century. They took over the hegemony in the trade with England from the Flemings later in the century and even began to get involved in the export of English wool to Flanders.
The first mention of a Hansa Almaniae (a "German Hansa") in English records is in 1282, concerning merely the community of the London trading post. This was a union of town merchant guilds (hanses) from Cologne, or the Rhineland, and Lübeck and Hamburg. It was maybe more the result of government pressure from London and the English king than a free decision. The settlement was only later made official as the Steelyard and confirmed in tax and customs concessions granted by Edward I, in a Carta Mercatoria ("merchant charter") of 1303. This led to constant friction over the legal position of English merchants in the Hanseatic towns and Hanseatic privileges in England, which repeatedly ended in acts of violence. Not only English wool but finished cloth was exported through the Hansa, who controlled the trade in English cloth-making centres.