If there is one subject that people quarrel about extensively and heatedly, it is property rights.

It starts in the sandpit at a very young age with tugs of war over a toy, and ends when kith and kin are informed of a surprising last will. Especially the moment and context of a transfer of property rights, i.e.

In the middle ages and early modern period this resulted in the creation of vast amounts of parchment and paper for recording the activities of institutions and communication with rulers, city governments and other institutions. In southern and (from the sixteenth century onwards) western Europe, notaries played an important role as custodians of documents concerning property rights. In the north and especially in the Hanse area, the parties turned to urban councils for making transfers of property rights official. In the event of contesting such rights, urban administrative bodies and, to an increasing extent, higher-level institutions like courts established by rulers became arenas to untangle conflicting interests. Additional documentation like testimonies or letters, certified by notaries or urban governments, became crucial. For historians, the practice of recording at least part of the proceedings of court and administration and keeping these records in the urban or state archives resulted in a sharp increase in the amount of sources surviving from this period.

This chapter argues that when we take several cases connected with Danzig (modern Gdańsk) and the Hanse area (i.e. the Baltic and North Sea regions) as an example, variation appears as the norm. There was an understanding that there existed different variants of law and legal practice which could apply to an individual’s case: in various cities, on various levels (i.e. including appeals) and even in various courts within a city. Besides proceedings in courts, arbitration and mediation took place. Moreover, there was an implicit understanding that when cases became intricate, there were also other means at hand, for instance urban or state diplomacy. My point is that establishing and contesting property rights in northern Europe was a matter of a composite legal culture and a culture of pragmatic diplomacy. Danzig is illustrative because of a number of reasons. It was a vibrant commercial centre which connected Baltic and North Sea trade, it was a member of the Hanse, it was an important political and juridical entity in the autonomous region of Royal Prussia, and it was the main harbour of the Polish Crown. Various layers of law, politics and economy shaped the city, which then translated into various practices and perspectives.

I would like to discuss two areas of contesting property rights in the Baltic and North Sea regions, which involved crossing multiple boundaries. The first one concerns conflicts about ships and three short case studies involving Danzig, La Rochelle, the Low Countries, Italy, Scotland, Norway and Portugal as either places of origin, places of described conflicts or places where a resolution was attempted. For two of the cases studies, sources have been analysed in detail elsewhere, but they will be addressed here from a different angle. Ships provide an excellent example of how movable property was framed by law and handled by legal practice.² Second, I will delve into the issue of inheritances through three further case studies exploring the intricate web of family and business ties in and between cities and regions, including Danzig and Prussia, Lübeck, Groningen and Antwerp. Inheritances offer distinct insights into such relations, especially when they were contested.³ In both areas of analysis, the underlying problem was that the mobility of skippers, merchants and their families made the question of property rights complex. The ensuing conflicts created a need to discuss such complexities in detail. The case studies have therefore been chosen not only on the basis of their transboundary content – and for two of them, their link to Scotland – but also on the basis of their ability to convey various perspectives.

The discussions of the complexities of the cases unveil two important aspects of legal culture. On the one hand, they show what was considered normal and usual in specific cases and localities. And on the other hand, they show that dealing with property rights conflicts involved a range of strategies: preventing clashes, de-escalating them or, of course, making attempts to resolve them. As such, this topic also contributes to the overall dynamic of conflict management in the Baltic and North Sea areas, which is the subject of my present research project.⁴ There, one of the main premises is that in order to grasp the place and the role of conflict in pre-modern society, different dynamics than only conflict resolution have to be considered. The project connects, complements and partly challenges insights from the legal, social, economic, political and diplomatic history of pre-modern northern Europe. It is constructed as a bottom-up analysis of sources anchored in nine mercantile cities in northern Europe, from London to Reval (modern Tallinn).⁵ The case studies discussed in this chapter stem from research which has preceded the project, and are drawn primarily from the State Archives in Gdańsk and the Archives of the Realm in Brussels.