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On the morning of the great fête, the streets and wharves of Bergen in Norway rang with jeers and catcalls. A troupe of adolescent boys was led through the streets carrying buckets, which they filled with scraps of tanners’ leather, horsehair, and other filthy sweepings. Crowds gathered to mock the parade. On arriving at their schøtstuene (clubhouse), the boys were taken to the fireplace and hauled one at a time up the chimney on ropes. A fire was banked with the stinking debris from the buckets. There each would dangle, dizzy and choking on foul-smelling smoke, while his masters interrogated him from below. If he survived, he was drenched with six casks of freezing water before being thrown into the harbour and thrashed as he surfaced for air. This was the initiation ritual forced on every German boy joining the Hanseatic League. If it was brutal, well, the league had no use for milksops and mother’s boys.
The Hansa Teutonicorum was, from the 14th to the 18th century, the most powerful trade and shipping federation in Europe. It was the Amazon, Facebook, or Google of its day: an all-conquering behemoth with flash offices in every major port city and a reputation for the most hostile of takeovers. After being strong-armed into signing a peace treaty with the league, one English diplomat said he ‘would rather treat with all the world’s princes than the Hanseatic Councillors’. Boys who joined the league as stubenjunge, or ‘house youths’, fit only for rough work and boot shining, were expected to become Hansa men, loyal to no-one but the league, ready to fight on sea and land, and obsessed with money. A league man couldn’t marry or have children; nothing was allowed to distract him from service to the hard bargain. ‘Sleeping with the enemy’ was forbidden lest any member betray business secrets to a Norwegian wife.
At its mightiest, the Hansa had offices in nearly 200 cities. Bergen was among its most northern outposts. The league began to take control of the city in the late 13th century, ousting English, French, and native Norwegian merchants. By the 1340s, it had a near monopoly in Bergen, controlling almost every man-o’-war, merchant ship, and one-rod fishing boat that came in – or sailed out. The league dominated the export market in cod, herring, walrus tusks, butter, animal hides, and furs, and the import of grain, malt, beer, hemp, and tar from Germany, rich stuffs from Italy and the Levant, Rhenish wine, and French sea salt.
By the turn of the 15th century, 3,000 of Bergen’s 14,000 inhabitants were German. To the citizens, the league buildings that fronted Vågen harbour were known as ‘the Lice Wharf’ because its occupants were so hard to get rid of – and so loathed. One has sympathy, though, for the boys, no more than 13 years old, who arrived in the city to serve their long apprenticeships in this freezing, rain-stropped outpost of the league’s empire. The living quarters of the wharf building, or gård, were cold and dank for much of the year. In 1702, a fire destroyed Bergen, and when the league rebuilt its tenement offices the following year as the painted timber structure that stands today, it enforced a law against open flames. Each gård had only one fireplace, in a room at the back, and no candles or lamps were ever lit – this in a city where nights can last 18 hours in winter. The apprentices took meals – weak beer, salted cod – in the schøtstuene, the scene of their inaugural humiliations.
The Finnegård, now the Hanseatic Museum, is a galleon of a building, its inner rooms as gloomy as a ship’s hold. As you climb the stairs, there isn’t a step or floorboard that doesn’t creak. It is a place of dark-painted wood and uneven, listing, seasick floors; how shadowy and conspiratorial it must have been. Glass panels set in lead let in a little sallow light. Only the state rooms, richly painted to awe trading partners, allow colour and peacock display. It is a place for plots and deals and the keeping of ledgers recording the names of merchants bankrupted, ships commandeered, and small-time fishermen vassalled to the league. Bergen became one of the busiest trading centres in Europe, but the Norwegians saw little of the money. Locals became economically dependent on the Germans, who arbitrarily decided the price of grain and dried fish, the staple diet of the Norwegian poor and journeymen classes.
Although the league insisted on celibacy, the gård backed on to a shambles of disreputable alleys. Here, between snippets of cabbage patch, were the city’s beer rooms and brothels. A Baedeker guide to the city from 1912 puts it delicately: ‘The clerks were forbidden to marry, and the immorality that prevailed in their quarters became notorious.’ Men were wise to be home before patrol hounds were loosed. The Norwegian historian Ludvig Holberg wrote in 1737: ‘The dogs were uncommonly large. They lay quietly during the daytime, letting people pass, but at night they were like wild beasts and permitted no strangers to enter the wharfs.’
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The masters slept in winter bedrooms in the building’s core, protected from the worst of the draughts, and in summer, airy bedrooms at the top of the house. The boys clambered into cramped bunks with sliding doors. The youngest ones shared; the older apprentices and journeymen had their own. Touchingly, the boys hung pictures – often German landscapes – inside their tiny rooms. Tom Hellers, deputy director of the museum, says these bunks leave the most lasting mark on the public: ‘If people visit again after 20 or 30 years, it’s always the beds of the apprentices they remember.’ You cannot look at these painted berths, made as jolly as an unlit, unheated cabin-bunk can be, with their pasted pictures, and not feel, as those boys must have felt, a surge of homesick longing.
The Hanseatic Museum and Schøtstuene, 1a Finnegården, 5003 Bergen, Norway. hanseatiskemuseum.museumvest.no
A version of this article appears in the May 2017 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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