Many Russian charters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contain a three-fold formula ‘Wherever the sokha, scythe and axe have gone’; about a hundred such phrases occur in documents of the Trinity monastery of St Sergius alone and the total number runs into several hundreds. Some versions are modified, sometimes substituting ‘plough’ for ‘sokha’, sometimes abbreviating the formula by omitting the first element. What did the formula mean? I take it to indicate the traditionally established bounds of the rural settlement, whether waste, hamlet, village or manorial settlement. Given the relatively low density of population and the continuing existence of much forest land, it was likely that, for most parts of the area, such bounds would not be precisely defined. Cultivation was generally extensive; intensive cultivation and precise bounds would only come about with increasing pressure of population on land. In a court case about 1492, Ivan Onisimov, a peasant, claimed he had ‘cut the wild forest and tilled that clearing for twelve years as far as the water from Korchmitovo hamlet; and beyond the water, sirs, you can see for yourselves now, the forest is wild to Korchmitovo and axe has not met with axe’. It seems probable that for several centuries after the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions axe had not met with axe in much of European Russia. Incidentally, the various ways in which the land–labour ratio was adjusted were, as will be seen, central to the operation of the peasant economy.