What Was the Steelyard in London?
The Steelyard, also known as the Stahlhof or the kontor of London, was the principal foreign trading post of the Hanseatic League in England. The Steelyard had existed in some form since the tenth century, and it was formalised in a series of charters that gave the merchants of the Steelyard extensive privileges in England. The Steelyard was the oldest of the four great kontore, and it was the principal channel through which the English wool and cloth trade was conducted.
The site
The Steelyard was located on the north bank of the Thames, in the heart of the City of London, between the present-day Cannon Street and Upper Thames Street. The site was originally a warehouse belonging to the merchants of Cologne, and it was known as the Stahlhof or steel yard, from the king’s scales that were kept there for the weighing of goods. The name was later applied to the entire kontor, and it became the common English name for the Hanseatic trading post in London.
A useful note: the name Stahlhof may also be linked to a medieval German sense of Stahl as “sample” or “sample-goods” — the warehouse may have been a place where samples of goods were kept for weighing and inspection. The folk etymology as “steel yard” (a balance with a heavy counterweight) is a later English reading, but the building’s name probably did not originally refer to a metal-balance.
The privileges
The Steelyard enjoyed privileges that were the envy of other foreign merchants. The privileges had been granted by a series of English kings, and they had been confirmed and extended over the centuries. The principal privileges were:
- The right to trade freely in most of the principal towns of England, including London, Boston, Lynn, Yarmouth, Norwich, and Bristol.
- The right to be exempt from most of the customs duties that other foreign merchants had to pay.
- The right to be judged by Hanseatic law in disputes with the English.
- The right to hold divine services in their own church, the Hallesche Kirche or Halle Church.
- The right to bury their dead in their own cemetery, the Hallesche Kirchhof.
- The right to bear arms within the city, in self-defence and in defence of their property.
The combination of trade privileges, customs exemptions, and legal jurisdiction made the Steelyard an “extraterritorial” institution — a foreign trading post on English soil, subject to Hanseatic rather than English law. The English crown granted these privileges reluctantly, and the kings tried to revoke them repeatedly — most notably under Edward I, Edward III, and Henry VII — but the League’s threat of embargoes and naval action forced the kings to back down each time.
Decline and revocation
The Steelyard was, in effect, an extraterritorial jurisdiction, and the merchants of the Steelyard had a substantial advantage over other foreign merchants. The Steelyard was the principal centre of the English wool and cloth trade, and the merchants of the Steelyard controlled a substantial part of the trade of England for several centuries.
The privileges of the Steelyard were, however, constantly under threat, and the League fought several wars and concluded several treaties to defend them. The privileges were finally revoked in 1551, in the reign of Edward VI, when the English decided that the Hanseatic monopoly of the cloth trade was no longer acceptable. The revocation of the privileges was a severe blow to the League, and it marked the end of the Steelyard as a Hanseatic institution.
A specific note on the 1551 revocation: the immediate trigger was the accession of Edward VI in 1547 and the new regime’s policy of strengthening the English cloth industry by ending the Steelyard’s privileges. The English Merchant Adventurers — the English merchants who had long been denied access to the Hanseatic trading system — were the principal beneficiaries of the revocation. The revocation was not contested by a League that, by 1551, was too weak to enforce its embargo threat.