at Chatou, at Le Pecq, at Maisons, at Conflans, at Poissy, at Triél, at Meulan, at Mantes, at La Roche-Guyon, at Vernon, at Les Andelys, at Pont-de-l'Arche, on Rouen Bridge, and, if it was to be sent to England, paid again, at Rouen itself, the droits de vicomté, de rêve et de haut passage, not to mention the Admiralty shipping license, freight, pilot's fees, and all the rest.
Yet in France Louis XI. had endeavoured to reduce the number of these dues, which had enormously increased during the anarchy of the Hundred Years' War. They were largely the outcome of anarchy. In Russia, on the contrary, they were the result of a system which grew worse and worse as the needs and demands of the State increased, and which was complicated and encumbered by a mass of minor regulations suggested by economic ideas, of which I have already pointed out the dangerous tendency. A Lithuanian merchant who had brought a quantity of cloth-stuffs to Moscow, and there taken over a corresponding quantity of beeswax, added a few trifling silver articles, and saw the whole of his merchandise seized, because the exportation of the precious metals was forbidden.
Trade still had to suffer from the general poverty of the urban centres. The towns were built of wood as a rule, and paved, when they were paved at all, with the same material. And once in ten years, for the most part, they were burnt down. After the fire of 1541, which consumed the whole of the Slav quarter at Novgorod—some 908 houses—another, in 1554, devoured over 1500 dwellings. One of the chronicles of the city—the second—is hardly more than a calendar of these periodical misfortunes. No precautions were taken to prevent a recurrence of the disaster. It was not till 1560 that it occurred to anybody to establish, near the dwellings, some of those troughs filled with water and those hooks shaped like huge brooms which may be seen to this day in the country parts of Russia at the entrances of the isbas, which are in constant danger of destruction. In 1570, the Government issued an order that no bath was to be heated in summer, and no bread baked, even, except in outdoor ovens.
To this may be added the condition of the roads in a country which, for want of the necessary materials, has to do without metalled highroads even now. From the port of St. Nicholas, on the White Sea, when the English landed there, to Vologda, where they opened their first counting-house, they had to travel fourteen times twenty-four hours by water, and eight days by road in winter; in summer-time the land road was impracticable for a long period. The journey from Vologda to Jaroslavl was reckoned at two days, that from Jaroslavl to Arkhangel at twenty, all by water. Between Novgorod and Narva, a most
