Conclusions
The property rights cases presented here, relating to ships and inheritances, have been chosen because of the transregional connections which lay at their heart. An important consideration is that such cases were usually better documented than more internal affairs.
The main conclusion which can be drawn here is that a pluriform transregional context was apparently no hindrance in conducting trade, dispatching ships or living in various towns and trying to retrieve inheritances. The connections certainly made the affairs more complex, but the complications seem to have been approached as part and parcel of the intended commercial activities. There was knowledge of the diversity of rules, of legal practices and of the legal fora which had jurisdiction, as well as of the possibility to navigate between them. The presented cases show that the use of urban, state and also organizational (Hanse) diplomacy was very much intertwined with legal actions.One might pose the question of what these complex, transregional cases meant for the more ordinary, internal cases which undoubtedly made up the majority of legal business entertained by urban courts. On the basis of the contents of the particular cases noted here, the transregional cases could be treated as an entirely different category. By extension it might be argued that they were exceptional and even misleading in helping us to understand urban legal culture in its usual forms in these northern European cities. However, we must keep in mind that the same contestants of property rights, such as for instance Jacob Kempe, were involved in both �internal’ and �external’ conflicts, that is, in matters pertaining both to Danzig only, and to those reaching beyond its boundaries and framed by the context of the Hanse, the Polish Crown, or contacts with Scotland or Portugal. Also, the very same councillors and judges were adjudicating such internal and external conflicts, drawing from the same pool of knowhow of laws and legal practice in northern Europe. They did not need to apply an entirely different logic in handling these affairs. The same people were also involved in diplomacy and – something which has not been discussed in this chapter but applies as well – in arbitration and mediation in internal and external conflicts. There were no fixed boundaries between diplomatic, judicial and extrajudicial conflict management on the one hand, and internal and external conflicts on the other hand.
In other words, the six short cases presented here illustrate not only the possibilities of dealing with property rights in a transregional context, but also offer a glimpse of how internal affairs were approached, and why there was no presumption that any one law or regulation would always lead to the same solution. If there was a shared urban legal culture in northern Europe, it was a culture of accepting local variation and making flexibility a virtue.