Daily life in Bergen during the Hanseatic period

A grounded look at a North Atlantic port where a regulated German trading enclave met a larger Norwegian town of households, crafts, churches, shipping, and market work.

This page uses “Hanseatic period” for roughly 1350 to 1754: from the establishment of the German Kontor at Bryggen to its replacement by the Norwegian Kontor. German merchants had already begun wintering in Bergen in the later thirteenth century, and the transition after 1600 was gradual as Bergen citizens acquired more trading rooms. The Kontor was neither the whole city nor an unchanged medieval institution, but a distinctive, mainly male merchant community within a larger working port.

Housing and Living Spaces

At Bryggen, narrow timber gårder extended inland from Vågen. Offices and lodging occupied the harbour end, warehouses filled much of the middle, and communal assembly rooms (schøtstuer), cookhouses, and some fire-resistant stone cellars stood towards the rear. Work, storage, and sleeping were close together. Open flame was restricted to the cookhouses because fire could race through the dense wooden rows; the assembly rooms consequently also provided warmth and light in winter.

The surviving buildings require care as evidence. Bryggen repeatedly burned, and its present appearance largely follows rebuilding after the fire of 1702. What survives most securely from the medieval town is the property pattern, some stonework, and waterlogged archaeological layers containing building remains and discarded objects. Elsewhere in Bergen, family dwellings, workshops, ecclesiastical precincts, and lodging for mobile workers produced lives unlike those inside the Kontor.

Food and Daily Meals

Trade records are clearer about cargoes than about individual plates. Stockfish, chiefly dried cod produced in northern Norway, came south in Norwegian vessels to be graded, stored, and re-exported; grain, salt, cloth, wine, and ceramics arrived from England, the Baltic, and continental ports. Imported grain mattered where local cereal production could not meet urban demand, but access varied with price and status. The evidence does not justify one “typical” meal for a German apprentice, a prosperous merchant, and a Norwegian household.

Within the Kontor, apprentices prepared hot food in shared cookhouses, with pots suspended over an open hearth. Meals and meetings took place in the adjoining schøtstue. This communal arrangement reflects fire regulation and the organisation of the trading yard; it should not be projected onto households across the city.

Work and Labor

Bergen's fish trade depended on a long chain of labour rather than on fishing at Bryggen itself. Producers in northern Norway caught and dried cod; crews carried it south; workers at the waterfront unloaded, sorted, weighed, bundled, stored, and reloaded it. Imported grain and other goods then travelled back through the same commercial network. The spring and late-summer arrivals of northern vessels created especially busy trading periods, although the best-preserved archival detail for these meetings comes from the later sixteenth century onwards.

Inside each trading room, a merchant or manager directed journeymen and younger apprentices who handled goods, kept watch, cooked, and learned commercial practice. Kontor rules governed admission, obedience, secrecy, discipline, and disputes. Crews, carriers, food producers, craftspeople, servants, and sellers supported the wider port. The documented Lübeck influence on late-medieval Bergen's shoemakers is one example of Hanseatic commerce affecting a local craft rather than simply replacing it.

Social Structure

The German Kontor had its own hierarchy and rules, and membership became increasingly exclusive in the later Middle Ages. Its ideal was a disciplined bachelor community separated from Bergen's family households, while the schøtstue hosted instruction, meetings, meals, and internal justice. Authority differed sharply between an overseas merchant, his manager, a journeyman, and a newly arrived apprentice.

That institutional ideal must not erase the wider population. Norwegian traders, officials, craftspeople, and labourers worked alongside the Kontor. Archaeology identifies women, men, and children at Bryggen before its establishment and a later decline in objects associated with women, not proof that women vanished from the waterfront. Women remained active in the surrounding town, though official merchant rules and records reveal their work unevenly.

Tools and Technology

Ships, ropes, hoists, barrels, sacks, balances, weights, writing materials, locks, and storage rooms made bulk trade possible. Drying racks belonged mainly at the northern production sites, not on Bergen's wharf. At Bryggen, fire-control equipment was equally important: water barrels, leather buckets, and fire hooks stood ready, while restrictions on lamps and hearths shaped when and where people could cook, gather, and work after dark.

Clothing and Materials

Excavated shoes, textile fragments, spindle whorls, loom equipment, needles, and shears provide firmer evidence than a reconstructed wardrobe. Wool and linen textiles and leather footwear were used, repaired, and discarded in Bergen, while imported cloth widened the choices of those who could afford it. Clothing varied by date, wealth, origin, occupation, and gender. The textile tools from Bryggen span c. 1150-1500 and therefore show production and repair around the early Kontor, not a single outfit worn throughout four centuries.

Bergen's surviving buildings, documents, and exceptionally rich organic deposits illuminate different parts of daily life. They show a port organised around stockfish, imported necessities, fire risk, and disciplined collective labour, but they do not make the experience of the German merchants representative of every person in the city.

References

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Bryggen. Description, integrity, and history of the World Heritage property. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/59/
Helle, Knut. “Bergen's Role in the Medieval North Atlantic Trade.” AmS-Skrifter 27 (2020), 43-51. https://journals.uis.no/index.php/AmS-Skrifter/article/view/254
Wubs-Mrozewicz, Justyna. “Rules of Inclusion, Rules of Exclusion: The Hanseatic Kontor in Bergen in the Late Middle Ages and its Normative Boundaries.” German History 29, no. 1 (2011): 1-22. https://academic.oup.com/gh/article-abstract/29/1/1/897020
Mygland, Sigrid Samset. Women in Medieval Bergen: Gender and Material Culture. The Bryggen Papers, Main Series 9 (2023). https://boap.uib.no/index.php/bryggen/issue/view/456
Øye, Ingvild. Textile Equipment and its Working Environment, Bryggen in Bergen c. 1150-1500. The Bryggen Papers, Main Series 2. Norwegian University Press, 1988. https://boap.uib.no/index.php/bryggen/issue/view/412
Wubs-Mrozewicz, Justyna. “Shoes and Shoemakers in Late Medieval Bergen and Stockholm.” Collegium Medievale 18 (2005). https://ojs.novus.no/index.php/CM/article/view/25
Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning (NIKU). The Medieval Town of Bergen. https://www.niku.no/en/bergen/
University of Bergen Library. Nordlandshandelen. Overview of the northern trade and its surviving archives. https://marcus.uib.no/exhibition/nordlandshandelen
The Hanseatic Museum and Schøtstuene. Fire Protection at Bryggen and Cooking. Museum Vest. https://hanseatiskemuseum.museumvest.no/brannvern-pa-bryggen-i-bergen; https://hanseatiskemuseum.museumvest.no/matlaging-cooking.