“Folke fit to be of Bacchus train, so quaffing is their kinde,
Drinke is their sole desire, the pot is all their pride;
The sob’rest head doth once a day stand needful of a guide,
And if he goe into his neighbour as a guest,
He cares for little meat, if so his drinke be of the best.”
Turberville, 1568.
The Muscovites knew not how to dance. At their merrymakings they made Tartars and Poles dance to amuse them; their music was obtained from brass hunting horns, trumpets, cymbals and the bagpipes. Kotoshin states that the boyards were “dull, ignorant men, who sit in silence, stroking their beards and making no reply to anything said to them.” The common people amused themselves on the “sway” or sea-saw; they loved to assemble in crowds and to sing and drink together. Some were drawn up and down in chairs, others went round and round in flying-chairs affixed to wheels pivoted, some perpendicularly, others horizontally; in short, the prototypes of the “merry-go-rounds” and “high-flyers” of pleasure fairs in Britain and elsewhere. In winter they sped down ice hills on their small sledges (tobogganing), and few only took pleasure in field sports, trapping birds and animals being part of the business of the lives of most; coursing and falconry the privilege of the Tsar and his suite.
In winter when the boyard stirred out of doors it was always in his sledge, where he lay upon a carpet in the skin of a polar bear. The sledge was drawn by a single horse “well decked,” a little boy astride its back, and servants of the boyard stood upon the tail of the sledge.
As traders they had an unenviable reputation. “The people of Moscow are more cunning and deceitful than all others, their honour being especially slack in business contracts—of which fact they themselves are by no means ignorant for, whenever they traffic with foreigners, they pretend, in order to attain greater credit, that they are not men of Moscow but strangers.” The market was in the Kitai Gorod. There the foreign merchants had their warehouses, and for centuries a Gostinnoi Dvor, not unlike the bazaar of Stamboul, occupied the site of the recently erected New Rows (Novi Riadi), but even at the present day the picturesque is not extirpated from the wholesale market. The Starai Gostinnoi Dvor has quite a charm of its own, and the adventurous sightseer who, not content with passing through it from the Ilyinka, turns off into the alleys furthest from the Krasnœ Ploshchad towards the wall of the Kitai-gorod, will see curious courtyards having large galleries around them; huge hatch-ways communicating with the vast vaults and stores below. Quaint shops line the wall of the Kitai-gorod from the Varvarka gate right up to the Nikolskaya; with a sort of permanent rag fair at that end, where, too, from the introduction of printing, the stalls and shops of the booksellers have been located. Another surviving market for miscellaneous articles—from old ikons and bludgeons to picked up trinkets and immense samovars—is held from six o’clock till noon on Sunday mornings around the Sukharev Bashnia. From time immemorial a great fair for frozen fish and game has been held outside the Kitai-gorod wall as soon as winter’s frost sets in. In this commercial district are various old churches of interest and, in the Cherkassky pereulok, the place of legal combat for those who justified their cause by an appeal to strength and skill.
In the administration of justice much was lacking, the principle of the paternal rule of the sovereign necessitating direct appeal by means of a petition. Later, a Prikase or office of direction was established, and this was followed by others empowered with the control of affairs relating respectively to carmen, Siberia, criminals, etc. As in all countries, misdemeanours against the property or liberties of individuals was regarded as a matter for personal redress by the party aggrieved; only those against the crown called for the active interference of the sovereign through his body-guard. The use of torture and some western methods of judicial procedure were introduced by Sophia Palealogus and the Italians who followed her, and were grafted upon native customs.