The wool went to the Hanse. The furs didn't come from where you'd think.

When

1170s – 1475

Distance on the map

70 kmalong the drawn route

Where

London, the Steelyard

Solid: the approach up the Thames to the Hanse's own dock. The Steelyard was never a cargo endpoint like the other four stops: it was their shared office.

A Hanseatic merchant working England's ports never ran one business. He ran two, entirely separate, sharing no single good: one with Bergen, dried cod for grain; another with Danzig, wool and cloth for wax and furs. What tied the two together was a building on the Thames, at Dowgate, where the accounts were kept, not the goods.

Merchants from Cologne held a house on that site from the 1170s; its name changed more than once: "Haus zu Cälner" in 1157, "Gildhalle Teutonicorum" in 1224, until, by around 1320, it was "Stalhof", the "sample yard" where goods received their guarantee seal. English speakers mangled the word into "Steelyard", the name that stuck, though it has nothing to do with steel.

What was worth defending there was a privilege, not a warehouse: at customs, the Hanse paid 3 pence in the pound on cloth, the same rate as English and Spanish merchants; every other alien merchant paid double. The privilege outlasted the raw-wool trade that first justified it: the Hanse had dominated England's wool export at the end of the 13th century, then lost it once Calais became, in 1363, the sole gate raw wool could leave England through, a monopoly handed to the English Merchants of the Staple. From then on, the Hanse's own business shifted from raw wool to finished English cloth.

In 1475 the Hanse bought the Thames-side site outright. It held it until 1598, when Elizabeth I closed it, and asked the remaining merchants to leave. What follows is the map of the two real trades, port by port.

When

c. 1380

Distance on the map

910 kmalong the drawn route

Where

Bergen, King's Lynn

Solid: the North Sea crossing between Bergen and King's Lynn: the Kontor's own trade, not a guess.

If one stop has to break the picture of a simple swap, wool out and furs back, it's Bergen. The Bergenfahrer, an association run out of Lübeck, held a European monopoly on dried Norwegian cod by the end of the 13th century. What left Bergen for England was dried cod; what went back was grain. That's it. No fur, no wax ever crossed on this exchange.

A Bergenfahrer ship calling at an English port could, separately, load English wool to sell in Flanders, then take on Flemish cloth bound for the Baltic, but that's a different business, with a different final destination, not a continuation of the Bergen exchange. The two never share a hold, on any ship.

Tyske Bryggen, the quay where the German merchants lived and worked, burned and was rebuilt more than once over the centuries; the wooden buildings seen at Bergen today are mostly reconstructions after later fires, not the 14th-century structures themselves. The site and its function, though, stayed the same for hundreds of years.

When

c. 1380

Distance on the map

1,510 kmalong the drawn route

Where

King's Lynn, Skagen, the tip of Jutland, Danzig (Gdańsk)

Solid: the North Sea crossing and the strait at Skagen, on to Danzig: the only sea route possible before the Kiel Canal.

German merchants from the Baltic secured trading privileges at Lynn as early as 1271, reconfirmed in 1310; the town recognised them officially, from 1302, as "the fraternity of the German Hanse". What left Lynn for Danzig, their chief destination from the 1380s, was wool, cloth, skins and lead; what came back was herring, timber, wax, iron and pitch.

The Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1474, gave the Hanse a quay and houses at Lynn; Lübeck delegated the property's upkeep to Danzig. The resulting building, Hanse House, is today the only Hanseatic trading headquarters that survives in England; Boston, which played just as large a part, kept nothing at all.

The wax on that list didn't come from Bergen, as a flattened version of the route might suggest. It came from Danzig, this map's last stop, which received it, in turn, from much further away.

When

c. 1380

Distance on the map

1,500 kmalong the drawn route

Where

Boston, Lincolnshire, Skagen, the tip of Jutland, Danzig (Gdańsk)

Solid: the crossing to Danzig, almost identical to Lynn's: the two ports worked the same route.

Boston became a wool staple town in 1369. Its role shifted fast: by the 1380s, according to Lincolnshire Life, citing S. H. Rigby and R. C. Nash's customs-account research, Hanseatic merchants carried an estimated 89% of the woven cloth exported through Boston and King's Lynn combined, not raw wool: a sign the business had already moved, as in London, from the raw material to the finished good.

What came into Boston: wax, dried fish, fish oil, furs, goatskins, much the same list as Lynn's, with small variations from one port to the other, because the two ports worked the same route to Danzig, not competing ones.

The building shown to visitors today as Boston's "Hanseatic Warehouse" is in fact a grain-and-fish warehouse built in 1815, more than two centuries after the Hanse left England. No genuine Hanseatic building survives at Boston, unlike Lynn.

When

c. 1380

Distance on the map

20 kmalong the drawn route

Where

the mouth of the Vistula, Danzig (Gdańsk)

Solid: the final stretch, from the mouth of the Vistula to the Danzig quay.

The furs and wax a Lynn or Boston merchant received at Danzig weren't local goods. They were the Novgorod Kontor's own exports: furs, wax, honey, timber, carried to Danzig and Lübeck by merchants who took the summer or winter shift on the long, dangerous road to Russia, under their own rules, codified in a text called the "Schra".

From Danzig to Novgorod was another roughly 1,500 km, a distance this map doesn't draw, because none of the four English ports in this story had a direct link to Novgorod. Whoever expected, until now, a simple swap (wool out, furs back, like one end of a Silk Road moved north) can now see why no English port actually ran that kind of round trip, with a single partner.