The Old English Court

1 · POSITION

The Old English Court on Varvarka Street, in the Zaryadye quarter of Moscow, is a stone house of the early sixteenth century that Ivan IV granted in 1556 to the Muscovy Company. It was the English merchants’ trading post, home and embassy at once, and the park that holds it calls it the oldest official representative office of a foreign country still standing in Moscow. [1, 2]

2 · HOW THE ENGLISH ARRIVED

In 1553 the navigator Richard Chancellor, looking for a sea passage to China and India, reached Russia instead, and Ivan IV invited him to Moscow. The Muscovy Company was founded in London in 1555 to work the trade that followed, and the next year the tsar gave it the house on Varvarka. [1, 2]

3 · A HOUSE BY CHARTER

The building was the English merchants’ trading post, home and embassy at once: the right to a roof in Moscow came with the right to trade, and the court was the company’s warehouse, its office and its residence, and the base from which England dealt with the tsar. [2]

4 · THE MUSEUM

The house opened as a museum in 1994 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II. It was restored again in 2013–14, and its updated exhibition, of objects found in Zaryadye and Kitay-gorod, opened in January 2016. [1]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The builder of the house is not named by the sources read. The grant by Ivan IV is stated by one source and not by the other. The register’s phrase — the earliest surviving building in Moscow where a foreigner was housed by right of charter — is the register’s reading of these facts. [1–2]