The privileges granted to European merchants in fifteenth-century London led to seething resentment in the City.
The Hanseatic League was a confederation of merchant guilds and towns that gained a stranglehold on trade in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Lübeck and other elite centres waxed fat, while to varying degrees towns from Novgorod to London were forced to accept restrictions on trade and political interference as the price of doing business. The yoke was heavy, and it chafed.