communities
of artisans, an organization which in many ways was connected with the
commercial movement, but which must not be confounded with it, did not
give rise to any political difficulty. It seems not even to have met with
any opposition from the feudal powers, who no doubt found it an easy
pretext for levying additional rates and taxes.

The most ancient of these corporations was the Parisian _Hanse_, or
corporation of the bourgeois for canal navigation, which probably dates
its origin back to the college of Parisian _Nautes_, existing before the
Roman conquest. This mercantile association held its meetings in the
island of Lutetia, on the very spot where the church of Notre-Dame was
afterwards built. From the earliest days of monarchy tradesmen constituted
entirely the bourgeois of the towns (Fig. 203). Above them were the
nobility or clergy, beneath them the artisans. Hence we can understand how
the bourgeois, who during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a
distinct section of the community, became at last the important commercial
body itself. The kings invariably treated them with favour. Louis VI.
granted them new rights, Louis VII. confirmed their ancient privileges,
and Philip Augustus increased them. The Parisian Hanse succeeded in
monopolising all the commerce which was carried on by water on the Seine
and the Yonne between Mantes and Auxerre. No merchandise coming up or down
the stream in boats could be disembarked in the interior of Paris without
becoming, as it were, the property of the corporation, which, through its
agents, superintended its measurement and its sale in bulk, and, up to a
certain point, its sale by retail. No foreign merchant was permitted to
send his goods to Paris without first obtaining _lettres de Hanse_,
whereby he had associated with him a bourgeois of the town, who acted as
his guarantee, and who shared in his profits.

[Illustration: Fig. 203.--Merchants or Tradesmen of the Fourteenth
Century.--Fac-simile of a Miniature in a Manuscript of the Library at
Brussels.]

There were associations of the same kind in most of the commercial towns
situated on the banks of rivers and on the sea-coast, as, for example, at
Rouen, Arles, Marseilles, Narbonne, Toulouse, Ratisbon, Augsburg, and
Utrecht. Sometimes neighbouring towns, such as the great manufacturing
cities of Flanders, agreed together and entered into a leagued bond, which
gave them greater power, and constituted an off