Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. If you explore the quayside in Kings Lynn in Norfolk,

you will find many beautiful buildings, but one of them I've always been particularly fond of. It's the Hanseatic Warehouse.

It's a herringbone brick building, you can see the timber frames. It's right there on the

key side of the Great Ouse River. And it's a reminder of a time when Kingsland was a great

port before the river had silted up. Ocean-going ships would come all the way in there and unload

their cargo. And this building was one of many in Britain, a key outpost of a remarkable commercial organisation.

The Hanseatic League, they had other sites in Britain. In fact, in London they had a whole area.

It was called the Steel Yard, and it's, roughly speaking, underneath Cannon Street Station today.

There was a walled community.

They had their warehouse on the river. They had a chapel, counting houses, their little guild hall.

They had wine cellars and kitchens and residential quarters. The jetties could be accessed directly by sea-going ships. And Kings Lynn and London, other outposts in Britain,

well, they were just a fraction of the similar sites

right across northern Europe,

stretching across the Baltic deep into what is now Belarusia

or even Russia itself.

If you squint a bit, they look a little bit like the beginnings of the colonies that

place like Britain and Portugal and Holland were setting up in South and Southeast Asia. But

the Hanseatic League wasn't quite like that. It might sometimes feel like a foreign kingdom.

It could enter into negotiations. It could even make war. But it wasn't a power. It

wasn't something that would become a nation state like the French or the Dutch. It was something very

different. It was an influential, but I find it quite a mysterious medieval trading network.

It was a loose collection of merchant elites in all these different places that worked together

...