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England and the German Hanse, 1157-1611: A Study of Their Trade and Commercial Diplomacy . By T. H. Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991. Pp. 428. $79.95. ISBN 0-521-40442-8.

Lloyd has written a commercial and diplomatic history of England and the German Hanse (Hansa Teutonicorum, dudesche Hense), a medieval and early modern European trade association first of merchants and then of towns, during the nearly 500-year period of their contact. His earlier publications on England's wool trade, alien merchants, and money supply during the Middle Ages eminently qualifies him for this task. Lloyd now adds to Philippe Dollinger's classic study The German Hansa (English translation, Stanford University Press, 1970) by providing new data and challenging previous historical wisdom. Moreover, along with the works of H. Zins on the Elizabethan period andj. K. Fedorowicz on the early-seventeenth century, students now have a fairly complete narrative of England's trade with the Baltic from medieval through early-modern times. This book is important for its wealth of details and the author's judicious analysis of them and no one studying northern European medieval and early-modern commercial and political history can afford to ignore Lloyd's contribution. His narration and analysis of the fluctuation of the volume and value of commercial exchange between England and the German Hanse is based upon the extant published and unpublished sources, chiefly customs accounts. He leaves little doubt that there is anything he has missed. Although his sources rarely permit him to present a series of three, five, or ten-year annual averages, his meticulous detailing of annual data at times obscures the flow of the narrative. This is equally true of his treatment of the diplomatic and political events and ambassadorial exchanges that conditioned that trade. Compounding this problem is the author's penchant for providing summaries of the political and commercial historical context at the end rather than at the beginning of sections or chapters. Lloyd is careful but firm when he speculates on what the sources mean or when he challenges interpretations of them by other historians, for example E. M. Carus-Wilson or M. M. Postan. The author's scholarship makes clear when and probably why the German Hanse was frequently divided in policy and purpose. The information provided on the relatively independent course taken at times by the Teutonic Order and the Prussian towns vis-a-vis the Hanse Diet and England has additional importance for scholars of Central and Eastern European history during the period of the Polish-Lithuanian dynastic union and consolidation. The progression of the English commercial penetration of the Baltic during the Middle Ages is carefully traced and provides the foundation