44 Hammel-Kiesow
upon his personal approval.90 Naturally, without autonomous control, the guild
would not have been able to restrict his own rights as mayor and sovereign.
The manner in which trade dealings were performed in the early Hanseatic
era is rarely documented. However, the Low German merchants seem to have
been flexible and obviously did not attempt, as an earlier image of the German
advance into the Baltic Region suggests, to enforce their own forms of law.
Instead, as is documented in Estonia, they conformed to local trading habits.91
Among other reasons, this was certainly a question of survival, and that prob-
ably not merely in the economic sense, so long as their own position was not
strong enough to enable them to dictate conditions themselves. In accordance
with a virtually document-free system of exchange, union trade conducted by
the members of the city guilds is only recorded in some few individual cases.
However, from these few cases, one may conclude that early Hanseatic travel-
ing companies, or the individual town traveling companies from which they
were comprised, also engaged in collective trading. From the efforts put forth
by merchants and cities since the late twelfth century to attain freedom from
the joint liability so closely associated with collective trade, one can deduce
that this form of trading was common.92
Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, company trading in the form of
bilateral Hanse wedderlegghinge (refutation) is well documented; its origins
more than likely stretching back to the tenth century. The term wedderleg-
ghinge expresses the apparently archaic founding action for the company, or
pooling of capital. One can just imagine two merchants standing across the
table from one another and pushing two piles of money together to form
the collective capital for the company. The essential characteristics of such
a company were shaped during a mainly document-free time period as can
witnessed in the simple proportions of 1:1 and 1:2 employed for the deposit of
capital. This capital was managed only by one of the two partners involved and
this partner was usually the one with the smaller deposit. This partner conse-
quently conducted trade excursions, but likely did so without the obligation
to follow special instructions, and this in spite of the tendency of sources to
sometimes refer to this partner as a page or serf subservient to the other, who
was called the lord. The profits were often shared, which may not be under-
90 hub 1, No. 88.
91 Blomkvist, Discovery, 505, 519f.
92 Rolf Sprandel, “Die Interferenz von Gesellschaften und Genossenschaften im hansischen
Handel,” in Nils Jörn, Detlef Kattinger and Horst Wernicke, ed., Genossenschaftliche
Strukturen in der Hanse, Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte, N.F.,
vol. 48 (Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag, 1999), 79–100.