But when the Drevlyans were completely intoxicated, she ordered her serving-lads to drink in their honor, went aside, and commanded her men to slay the Drevlyans, which was done, five hundred dying thus.

Then Olga returned to Kieff, and made ready an army against the remaining Drevlyans.

Such is one of the vivid pictures of ancient manners and customs which the chronicle of Nestor furnishes.
The descendants of Prince-Saint Vladimir were not only patrons of education, but collectors of books.

One of them, in particular, Vladimir Monomachus, is also noted as the author of the "Exhortation of Vladimir Monomachus" (end of the eleventh century), which he wrote for his children, in the style of a pastoral address from an ecclesiastic to his flock--a style which, in Russia, as elsewhere, was the inevitable result of the first efforts at non-religious literature, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

"Chiefest of all," he writes, among other things, "forget not the poor, and feed them according to your powers; give most of all to the orphans, and be ye yourselves the defenders of the widows, permitting not the mighty to destroy a human being.