Tula armourers at the time constituted a special estate special rights and privileges. They had a different way of life, a specific relationship about the state and a peculiar organization of production.

Although the Tula blacksmiths were subordinate to the local authorities, they lived separately and for a number of issues were unaccountable to them and not subject to prosecution. They enjoyed a certain democracy, had the right to choose factory guards.

All the estate was divided into several "shops", that is, groups of people of one specialty. In the XYII century such workshops were four: barrel, lock, lodgment and sackcloth.

It was then that the families of well-known Tula entrepreneurs Mosolovs, Batashevs, Orekhovs, Lyalins, Goltyakovs, Luzhnins and, of course, the famous Demidovs formed in the arms production.

Even in 1630, part of the Kuznetsk settlement was included part of the Tula vobrochnyh and village blacksmiths. It was then that he became a state master Demid Aktufiev from the village of Pavshino, father of the future Nikita Demidov.

It is no accident, probably, the best Tula masters Tsar Peter sent to various cities for the organization of iron-making and weapons factories.

It is possible to say with confidence that the Tula armourers stood at the streams of the domestic metallurgical and metalworking industry.

Peter the Great led a real struggle for quality. In the year 1698 he warned gunsmiths and their elders that if the gun was made ... not for exemplary and bad skill or in bad iron, for blacksmiths all for a blunder ... for negligence to be cruelly punished , In perpetual ruin. "Thanks to the firmness of the king in matters of quality, the skill and skill of the Tula gunsmiths grew rapidly"

In the late 80's and early 90's Peter the Great required to put in the army two thousand picks a year and very hard punishes for arrears.

As a result of harsh, and often cruel measures, by the beginning of the 18th century the surrender of guns had already increased to 6,000-7,000 a year. But this was before the armament of a growing army.

In the spring of 1700 Peter at the head of the forty-thousandth army begins a war with Sweden, for the return of the land still seized by Veliky Novgorod and the exit to the Vadtiyo-Sea.