The adverse influence of this great confederation of German cities upon our country for two or three centuries has never been sufficiently emphasized in our histories. Possibly the earlier historians who were contemporary with the Hanseatics were "got at" by their representatives, who swarmed in this country and had an organized system of bribery, with a regulated scale of bribes for all sorts of people, from the Lord Mayor of London downwards. They seem to have been about the only people in the later Middle Ages with ready cash in the north of Europe, and they were glad to lend the Kings of England money to carry on their interminable wars with France in return for various concessions, which generally hit British trade pretty hard. They knew how to get good security for their loans, and in Edward III's time they actually had the British crown in pawn at Cologne! One proof of their tremendous financial influence in this country remains to this day in the word "sterling". We still say "one pound sterling", "sterling gold", &c. Now "sterling" is nothing but a corrupted form of "easterling"--a man from the eastward, as these Hanse traders used to be called--when they were not referred to as "Prussians". At the Conquest, and for long afterwards, we were a nation of agriculturists, soldiers, fishermen, and sailors. Our only regular trade was in wool, therefore known as the "staple" industry--generally "the staple" for short. It was the desire to get their greedy fingers into this our only "pie" that first brought the Hanse traders into this country in force some time in the thirteenth century, though we had not been free from them since the days of Ethelred. They were allowed to make their head-quarters in the Steelyard in London (where Cannon Street Station now stands), to import merchandise on paying a nominal duty of 1 per cent, to be licensed victuallers, keeping inns, hotels, and wine shops, to have special courts of jurisdiction of their own, which put them above English law, and actually to hold one of the gates of the city. Have we not seen this financial, business, trading, and inn-keeping undermining of British interests in our own day by the modern easterlings?