The year was 1483 and the nunnery of Harvestehude near Hamburg was exceptionally noisy. A clerical visitation – basically an inspection to ensure the strictures of monastic life were not too far relaxed – had arrived from the bishop of Bremen, and the gentlemen, accompanied by two members of the honourable council of Hamburg, were surprised to find themselves face to face with an angry crowd. Family and friends of the nuns had assembled to defend them from what they saw as an imposition of their lives, and for all the efforts of the councillors to defuse the situation, the day ended with them returning to the city while the bishop’s inspectors sought refuge with nearby Dominicans, their clerical dignity offering less security from the irate citizens than the solid brick walls of the priory.
If anyone had hoped this would blow over, the next day disabused them of such notions. A crowd gathered at the town hall demanding that the unwelcome visitors should leave immediately and threatening to throw them out if they did not do so voluntarily. Though the council tried to reassure them no decisions would be made without the agreement of the nuns, they refused to be placated. Indeed, as more and more people assembled, other grievances came to be aired, and soon enough the council got an earful. There were, after all, worries enough, and above all else, a serious cost-of-living crisis. The rulers of the city knew they had a real problem on their hands now.
How had it come to this? The fight over Harvestehude provided a flashpoint, but as so often, it was not really significant in itself. The nunnery was one of thousands such places where women lived a quiet religious life they had chosen for reasons of their own. They resented the imposition of harsh ascetic rules by outsiders, and so did their friends and family. Confrontations like this happened everywhere in Catholic Europe, but they rarely led to riots. The mood in Hamburg was tense in the late fifteenth century.
At first glance, this seems surprising. By all conventional accounts, Hamburg was thriving. The town had grown large and prosperous from trade and exporting its famous beer. Its position as the north sea port of mighty Lübeck ensured it was among the top tier of Hansa cities, it controlled territories as far as 100 km away, dominated navigation in the Elbe estuary, and sent merchant ships as far as Portugal and recently, Iceland. But one person’s exciting opportunity is a threat to another’s livelihood, and the government of Hamburg, dominated by wealthy merchants, had a long tradition of taking care of its own first. The working inhabitants, not just the poor, were feeling the pinch as herds of pigs and cattle from the fat pastures of Holstein were sold southward to affluent buyers and bargeloads of grain coming down the Elbe from Saxony and Bohemia disappeared in the holds of westbound cargo ships. Meat and even bread were becoming harder to afford every day.
Hamburg would become famous for its salt beef, a glorious dish of cold-smoked, slow-cooked meat that surely will get its own article one day, but many of its people could only dream of affording such fine cuts. Their lot was bones for soup, or sausages, a staple of North German dining to this day that we have few early recipes for. They were simply too common. We should not imagine a muscle meat sausage like modern bratwurst or salami – the good meat suitable for preserving rarely went into sausages. Instead, they used offal, intestinal fat, blood, and offcuts augmented richly with boiled grains. To this day, Grützwurst is a local specialty, either red (with blood) or white (without). It can be eaten cold on bread or cooked with vegetables. In Bremen, it is śerved with slow-cooked kale and potatoes as the confusingly named Grünkohl mit Pinkel.
This is a tradition that goes back far and reaches through large parts of Central Europe. The late 15th-century Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch takes the actual recipe for granted, but suggests a refinement:
93 Item if you would make green sausages, take parsley and eggs. And grind that together. Then take groats and fat meat and spices. Make a sausage of that.
Actual instructions for making such sausages do not show up until much later. Ohe of the earliest detailed descriptions is given by Marx Rumpolt:
Blood sausage from a wild boar. When a wild boar is wounded or caught alive so it can be stabbed to death like a domestic pig, catch the blood and stir it well, cut bacon (Speck) into it, take a few white bread rolls, cut them all around or grate them on a grater, soak them in milk and pour this into the blood altogether. Add pepper, ginger and mace and see you do not oversalt it, that way the sausages turn out mild and good because of the milk and the bread. Then take clean rice that is nicely cooked and picked clean, that is how the Bohemian peasants do it with barley and buckwheat, it is good in many ways if they are filled and cooked in water. Lay them on clean straw and leave them there overnight, then you may cook it as you would have it. When they are cooked fully, serve them with ground horseradish made with a good beef broth. That is how the Bohemian peasants like to eat it.
(Rumpolt p. LIII r)
Note how this is really two recipes – the courtly kind with white bread and cream, and the common one with barley or buckwheat porridge. The latter is how Grützwurst is made, and what the people of Hamburg toon often found painfully expensive to get with their also increasingly dear rye bread.
The records of 1483 are patchy, and we largely have to rely on a much later chronicle, the Wandalia by Albert Krantz, to reconstruct how things went down. Unusually, we do learn the name of a popular leader, Hinrich von Lohe. He is quoted as saying that “…we must starve while just yesterday, a great herd of oxen and swine was brought south over the Elbe…” and that clearly touched a nerve. The council was nervous and like rulers everywhere decided to address the source of their unease by force. They had Heinrich von Lohe secretly arrested and questioned.
Secrecy is a very relative concept in a medieval town, though. There was no militarised police, no plainclothes branch, no isolated detention sites to spirit anyone away to. As soon as his absence was noted, angry citizens began looking for Hinrich von Lohe. They took hold of several councillors and two mayors (Hamburg had several), roughing up one of them in the process. The Wandalia dramatically describes his face marred with blood, but he seems to have taken no major damage except to his robes. Eventually, the crowd went to the city prison and forced the guards to open the doors. Hinrich was freed and accompanied home by a jubilant crowd who forced the bloodied mayor to publicly apologise to him before he was allowed to leave. Tellingly, they did not kill or lock up any of the men they had taken, even allowing the elderly mayor to go home after he pleaded infirmity. These people were out for justice, not blood.
Over the coming days, the confrontations continued, with armed citizens assembling to make demands and the councillors trying to calm them. When they refused to stop several merchant ships loaded with grain from leaving for the Netherlands, matters came to a head. Angry, armed people stormed the town hall, broke into the council chamber, and confronted the mayors with their demand for bread. It is unclear what exactly happened next: Alarm bells were rung, supporters and opponents of the council assembled, but in the end, there was no bloodshed. Krantz sees this as a victory of civic virtue over anarchy, but it looks more likely that nobody had control of the situation and in the end, both sides avoided civil war neither wanted.
The aftermath sounds anticlimactic: Everyone just went home. The council reasserted its authority, and two ringleaders of the rioting were identified and executed. But tellingly, this was no victory for the merchant class. The councillors had heard the grievances of the people and though they had not agreed to take the extraordinary measures they demanded at the time, they codified and publicly announced measures to ban food exports in time of dearth. Such laws, it must be said, already existed, but had not been enforced before an angry ship’s carpenter broke open the gates of the council chamber.
The unrest of 1483 is interesting, but in no way exceptional. The confrontation was triggered not by grand affairs of state, but by a fairly trivial issue. People were upset because outsiders were interfering with their lives, in this case, specifically that of a group of nuns who were not usually even all that popular. Once the protest gathered momentum, other grievances were aired and demands made. The council had no police or military to crack down, so they took to negotiating, stalling, and trying to take out the leaders, but in the end, they had to accept that what their people were demanding was actually not that unreasonable. If you lived and worked in a rich town, it was reasonable you should share a modest portion of that wealth, though sometimes, you needed a carpenters’ axe to get the attention of the powerful.