My Honours Thesis is Officially Published!
“The Bay Fleet Capture: An Act of Piracy and Corruption Between England and the Hanseatic League, 1449”
UBC has officially published my honours thesis in their repository! You can’t find it by searching for it in a library or online, but it is available to anyone searching UBC’s cIRcle database!
You can access it here.
Doesn’t my name look nice like that, all official and proper?
My bibliography entry in Chicago style would be this:
Janzen, Bane. “The Bay Fleet Capture : An Act of Corruption and Piracy between England and the Hanseatic League, 1449.” Undergraduate honours thesis, University of British Columbia. 2026. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/94295.
This is rather exciting for me. I have now officially published two things in my life. And it is from this moment that my career as a professional historian begins! Thank you all for supporting me this far!
Summary of my Thesis:
The Bay Fleet (Baienflotte) was a naval convoy of around one hundred Hanseatic, Dutch, Flemish, and Zealander ships that annually assembled in Flanders and braved the English Channel to trade for salt in France. In 1449, English privateers contracted for seakeeping captured the fleet, plundered its cargoes, and seized the Hanse ships, with much of the spoils going to the King’s Council, sparking a minor trade war. Little research has focussed on the capture in detail. This thesis reconstructs the event and interprets its causes and consequences from archived fifteenth-century chronicles, parliamentary rolls, and Hanse correspondence. The capture demonstrates the consequences of the politicisation of trade for corrupt politicians’ personal gain. Greed and shortsightedness in the Lancastrian government of King Henry VI and the Duke of Suffolk allowed for polarising tariffs and piracy while English merchants ultimately bore the cost, contributing to the outbreak of Jack Cade’s Rebellion in 1450.
