The carpenters celebrated in the name of Carpenter’s Lane (Plotnikov pereulok) were the Royal Master Carpenters. The area was a substantial carpenter’s village built around the St Nicholas Church from the fifteenth century. Prior to the twentieth century the Lane was still called St-Nicholas-Miracle-Worker-At-Carpenters. Historians have an alternative theory about the “Carpenter’s Village” – that it could have been a community of workers who had fled Ivan III’s fearful purges of Novgorod, in the civil war.