“One of forty sobols” – bag of sobols that included 40 sables?

The study of Russian sources shows that nobody did ever decipher the words “forty sobols”, whether one, two or “forty times forty”. The assumptions of historians, linguists and other specialists that one can talk about forty sobols, which were in every forty is not confirmed by Russian sources. Some new documents published by the Romanian historian Mihai Maxim shed new light on this issue. One of them shows exactly that in every forty (cases) were 20 sobol skins.