Still, there were plenty of pelts for export. They were in fact the country’s chief commodity. Caravans from Siberia brought their cargoes of fine pelts to the great market towns of Novgorod and Moscow. Ivan the Terrible personally enforced a tribute of thousands of sables each year from the western Tartars across the Urals. The value of Russia’s fur exports to Turkey, Persia and the countries of Christendom reached into millions of rubles yearly. Trade with the Russians, however, was very unsatisfactory to the English. For one thing Dutch competition bid up the prices of Russian fur. Some pelts “cost more there with you than we can sell them for here” the London merchants wrote ruefully to their factors in Russia. Then there was the fickleness and downright trickiness of the Russians who being “very mistrustful ... doe not alwaies speake the trueth, and think other men to bee like them.” To these woes were added the enormous difficulties of the icy northern route. They were almost insuperable; yet the taxes imposed on cargoes through the Baltic by the King of Denmark were unbearably high. It was all very frustrating. In the end proclamations were published in England against the use of foreign furs--and these laws were not entirely sumptuary. True, the Renaissance had brought fashion consciousness to the middle class Englishman to such an extent that it was often difficult to distinguish between a noble and a well-furred commoner. There was urgent need for proclamations to stop that. Often in the past such proclamations had been necessary when the craze for furs mounted inordinately. “Sabyls be for great estates” had been one historic royal edict. Henry VIII, who decked himself lavishly with furs plundered from the monasteries and indulged in cozily “furred nightgowns” for his evening escapades, issued many a decree limiting the use of precious pelts to the chosen few. Other monarchs had done the same thing. Over and above this need for class distinction however, it irked the relatively poor English royalty to be gouged in the market place for one of its regal necessities. From earliest Norman times imported furs had been used in England to designate royal rank. Even before that, in the ninth and tenth centuries, nobility and ranking clergy trimmed their garments with beaver and fox. In the fourteenth century Edward III issued a decree specifying ermine, symmetrically spotted with astrakan or other bits of black, to be a royal fur. A whole set of heraldic tinctures was based on fur. Ermine was represented by white flecked with black, variant patterns and colors being termed ermines, erminois, pean and so forth. Vair was shown as blue and white alternating in the manner of small skins sewn together, some of its variants being counter-vair, potent and counter-potent. Feudal lords of England had been inclined to treat their equipage of furs as heirlooms, handing them down from generation to generation.