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 offensive and defensive compact (Fig. 204). A typical example of this last institution is that of the commercial association of the _Hanseatic Towns_ of Germany, which were grouped together to the number of eighty around their four capitals, viz., Lubeck, Cologne, Dantzic, and Brunswick. [Illustration: Fig. 204.--Seal of the United Trades of Ghent (End of the Fifteenth Century).]