158 Burkhardt
Sea, they cut off a large area that asked for goods from the Scania fairs. This
forced others, especially Hollanders, to find other ways to supply their home
market with herring (mainly by introducing their own herring fishery). This
also caused Wendish merchants to lose a large number of possible customers.
This early decline might be one reason why Scania is not seen as one of
the main kontors. It was never named a kontor in the sources and it did not
develop into a strong kontor community with an administration, written stat-
utes, a clerk, and all the other institutional features we have seen at the other
four kontors. But in 1400, Scania was like the other four kontors as they were to
each other and much less like the smaller outpost.
The Outposts (Kaunas, Åbo, Boston, Hull, Lynn, Ravenser,
Tönsberg) Geographical Situation
Besides the four kontors and the Vitten at Scania there was a large number of
smaller outposts available to Hanseatic merchants who wanted to trade in
the area between Smolensk in the east, Oslo in the north, Edinburgh in the
west, and Lisbon in the south. We don’t have a final definition of an outpost,
however, according to the criteria found in enumerations specifying up to 50
Hanseatic outposts, a common feature of the outposts was that they were
not permanently manned. Most of the year, the buildings were empty, only
to be used during a short period of time every year. Outposts could be found
in nearly every large town at the shores of the Baltic and North Seas, in the
interior Baltic region, in the Low Countries, at the Bay de Bourgneuf, and in
Lisbon. Some of them were not very important for the Hanseatic merchants.
Trade in places like Rasborg in Finland or Lödöse in Sweden can’t be traced
in large quantities and is hardly named in the sources. Other outposts, how-
ever, are more well-known. Very important for Baltic trade in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries were Hanseatic outposts in the East English ports of
Newcastle, Scarborough, Hull, Boston, King’s Lynn, Norwich, Yarmouth, and
Ipswich. After the English cloth industry started large-scale production in the
late fourteenth century, merchants from Hanseatic towns concentrated on one
of the ports and its cloth producing hinterland as suppliers for their regional
market. Cooperation went so far that different styles and designs were exported
from the different ports fitting local demand in the towns. Formally, the out-
posts in England were under the sovereignty of the aldermen in London, but
the merchants using the Stalhof in Boston felt much more bound to the kontor
in Bergen. Most of the merchants went to Bergen on an annual summer busi-
ness trip, than to the Stalhof in London.