Harry Best, an Englishman, made good his claim against a defaulter in a trial by combat, which resulted in an immediate petition by the Muscovites to the Tsar, to forbid foreigners engaging in the lists with citizens. As for criminals: thieves were imprisoned and knouted but were not hanged for a first offence; for a second offence, a thief lost the nose or an ear and was branded on the forehead; the third offence was punished with crucifixion, which was a customary penalty long after the days of Ivan IV. Impalement in various ways was also practised; heretics were burned; false-coiners boiled in oil; during winter the condemned were thrust under the ice and drowned. The long category of barbarous punishments borrowed from the west, being minutely followed in addition to excisions, amputations, mutilations and cruelties of local origin. One of these may be mentioned, "the death by 10,000 pieces," when the condemned was cut away bit by bit and the parts seared to prevent death by hæmorrhage before it was necessary to attack a vital part. Another form of it was to insert a hook under a rib and pull the bone out of the side--the Muscovite equivalent of the western method of extorting money from Jews by the extraction of tooth after tooth. Ivan "Groznoi" practised even worse cruelties. The widow of one of his victims he put astride a coarse rope and drew her to and fro upon it until sawn through--in this rivalling the excesses of enthusiastic religious persecutors in the Netherlands. More refined was his fiendish practice of hanging in the doorway of a boyard's house his wife, child, or some other loved one of the boyard, then compel the man to go to and fro past the corpse that day by day became more repulsive. Worse even than this did Ivan "Groznoi," the cruel Tsar, but his worst need not be mentioned unless, at some future time, men name him not the "Terrible," but call him the "Great." In the days of Peter the Great men were still impaled or crucified; were burned in small pens filled with straw; were beheaded on a block and "hanged as elsewhere." Le Bruyn says, one day he saw a man burned alive, and in another part of the town a woman buried, with small tapers burning near her; and "all executions with such silence, that what takes place at one end of the town is unknown at the other." Afterwards, were such barbarities as the Empress Elizabeth ordered to be inflicted upon the Boyarina Lapunof, and still later such cruelties as the Countess Soltikov exercised on her serfs. In fact the tale of Moscow's woe was not told until the advent to the throne of that greatest of dead Tsars, Alexander II., the true reformer of Russia.