When the tenants on demesne land asserted their right to sell their labor to the best advantage, the lords in turn claimed their right to use their lands to the best advantage. Since profitable sheep farming required fewer laborers than ploughing and reaping, less and less acres were kept in cultivation by the lords. Frustrated and starving, the tenants were forced to abandon their homes and seek precarious employment in the towns and cities. But feudalism retreated before this shift to community life and a nation of five million restless people emerged from its former agricultural isolation. Although the sheep farmers and wool merchants improved their capital fortunes at the expense of the poor laborers, they had notwithstanding built up a great national industry. England at last had something to sell! In 1553 an expedition carrying woolens for trade with the Tartars attempted unsuccessfully to reach Cathay by a northeast polar passage. Defeated by ice and death, a surviving remnant did nevertheless manage to reach the White Sea and to journey south into Russia to Moscow. There they made a trade agreement of sorts with Ivan IV, called “the Terrible.” The merchant adventurers of England promptly set up the Muscovy Company to handle what looked like a promising commerce with Russia and through that country with the caravans of Persia. But the English never found the Russians rewarding as either customers or middlemen. While their czar was willing to sell furs, felts and naval stores, or wax and honey, he wasn’t particularly interested in buying coarse woolens. His subjects wore fur. The subjects of the czar did indeed indulge themselves in both the beauty and warmth of fur. Except for the summer months Russians of quality went about in all manner of furred luxury. From bearskin, lynx, squirrel, beaver, fox and marten were fashioned their capes and bonnets, as well as their fine tailored coats sporting decorative braid loops and toggles. Women wore handsomely brocaded velvet coats lined and trimmed with expensive fur. Nowhere in the western world did royalty make such extravagant use of precious pelts. The nobility of Russia affected enveloping gowns and pelisses of sable, ermine and vair. Esteemed above all other pelts for certain wear was black fox. Nobles used this rare fur to make up their distinctive wide caps enclosing tall felted bonnets in the fashion of Babylonian hats. Millions of lesser folk in Russia, wearing caps and buskins, and shedding cloth tunics for long waistcoats of fur in the winter, consumed vast quantities of muskrat, wolf, lamb skin and reindeer hide.