The early settlers were chiefly traders, but they also coined silver money and made weapons; it was usual for the Tsar to honour the house by a ceremonial call early in the new year, and towards the autumn, the Tsar and Court accompanied the merchants the first stage of their homeward journey towards Archangel, and gave them a parting feast and toast at a picnic in the forest--a custom observed by Peter I. until he founded St Petersburgh. Their status was, and is, that of foreign guests, and they were subject to the common law and custom. William Barnsley of Worcester appears to have been the first Englishman exiled to Siberia. Ivan the Terrible thought him too familiar in his behaviour towards the Tsaritsa, so banished him, but he returned after twenty-six years, hale and very wealthy. Giles Fletcher, father of Phineas Fletcher, the poet, obtained an undertaking that Englishmen should not be put to the torture or put on the put-key--whipping block--before condemnation. His own book on Muscovy was promptly suppressed on the petition of the Russia Company, whose members so far from supporting the rights of their countrymen, were not altogether displeased that an escaped apprentice--or other roving Englishman--if not roasted, "yet were scorched." Peter the Great put to death the beautiful Miss Hamilton, a lady of honour to his wife Eudoxia and nearly related to his own mother's foster-parents, but he is said to have accompanied her to the scaffold and picked up the head as it dropped from the block and pressed his lips to hers. There were Englishwomen in Moscow in the sixteenth century, for, apart from the anecdote respecting Ivan's treatment of them, Jane Richard, the widow of his physician, the notorious Dr Bomel, was sent back to England in 1583, and in 1602 John Frenchman founded the _Apteka_ in Moscow in 1586, and returned [Illustration: TOWER OVER THE REDEEMER GATE (SPASSKI VOROT)] to Moscow with his wife and family in 1602. From the complaints of the Russia Company of their young employees, it would appear that married men were sent out, "as also a Divine to exhort the single to righteous conduct," quite early in its history. From these people who lived apart from the citizens and enjoyed certain privileges, the Russians derived new ideas as to woman's place in the household, and many families adopted the foreign customs long before Peter "commanded" that the terems should be thrown open and the example of the Court followed by all.