In its time of greatest prosperity the factory at Bergen counted about three thousand souls, all vowed to celibacy, which was imposed on them under most severe penalties. The fear was that union with the native women might lead to the divulging of Hanseatic secrets, or induce the men to settle permanently in this spot, and so become denaturalized. Members of the Hansa were strictly forbidden to spend a night outside the factory. Armed watchmen and savage dogs exercised a rigid guard. These residents were usually agents for merchants in the Baltic cities. After ten years' sojourn, they were obliged to return to their native town to give place to new arrivals, who then had to go through the various gradations of rank, beginning as office boy, and ending, if luck favoured, as alderman. It was a sort of hierarchic organization, of which the rules were most rigidly enforced. Entrance dues for vessels, fines, and money penances defrayed the general expenses of the factory; each town paid for the board, wages, and arming of its representatives. Not all members of the Hansa, however, were permitted to trade with Bergen, the conditions being purposely made onerous and expensive. In the same restrictive spirit, and to hinder a great influx of men to the factory, a series of probationary ordeals was planned, through which every new-comer had to pass. By rendering these tests difficult and repulsive they hoped to deter from Bergen the sons of opulent families, for whom the advantages to be gained there would be counterbalanced by the perils of initiation. These "games," as with grim humour they were termed, were entirely in keeping with the grotesque spirit of the age, and analogies are to be found, though less gross, in the religious orders and the institutions of chivalry. The mildest of them resembled in some respects the practices common to British sailors in crossing the line. It is scarcely strange, that in the frigid, rigid north, among a population naturally rough, far from home, friends, and the more refining influences of life, a prey to deadly _ennui_, imagination should have taken a fierce and coarse turn. [Illustration: SHIP AT THE END OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.]