We have so far considered the peasant household unit in static isolation. Now we must consider it in relation to the world around it. This is done here by looking at peasant farming in three regions which extend across central Muscovy.

‘Muscovy’ is an imprecise term, and some word of explanation may be needed for its use in my title. First, its acceptability to the English reader has been well established since the sixteenth century. Some Russian historians object that it is not the term used by contemporary Russians themselves and partly that it is a disdainful western term. Here it is used to indicate the Russian late-fifteenth-seventeenth-century state centred on Moscow, sometimes called the Moscow State, or the Russian tsardom or state. Second, the term is imprecise since the area under Moscow's rule varied over time, and also that rule itself varied in nature. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Moscow's authority increased and evolved as other principalities were incorporated.

The three areas to be examined here are found on a line about the 56th parallel across what is now European Russia. They are the Moscow area itself, Toropets and Kazan'. Toropets was incorporated as a result of military action against Lithuania at the very beginning of the sixteenth century; Kazan' was incorporated by similar means half a century later. As will be seen, these two areas differ considerably in physical and cultural environment.