Huss wrote: “If you love your poor Goose, see to it that the king sends him guards.”[1]
Of Huss’s boyhood and his university career our knowledge is scant. His parents were poor but not in necessitous circumstances.[2] His father, whose name was John, died when he was a child, and, according to Flajshans, the son was called in his youth after his father, Jan Michaluv. His mother seems to have devoted much attention to her son’s care and was wont to accompany him to school. Later she went with him to Prague, when he entered upon his university career. He had brothers whom he recalled with affection in his last days, and one of these brothers had sons whom Huss, writing shortly before his death, commended for a trade, as they seemed to him not to be fitted for the spiritual office. Of his school life at Prachaticz, a neighboring town to his birthplace, we know no details with certainty. The exact date of his entrance upon his studies in the university of Prague is uncertain, though it was probably 1389. There he studied in the department of the arts and philosophy and also theology. From this time on we find his name spelled Jan of Husinecz. To use the technical language of the time, he was promoted to the degree of B.A. 1393, B.D. 1394, and M.A. 1396. Huss never reached the doctorate of theology and, until the end, called himself bachelor of sacred theology or as in his letters Magister J. Hus. He helped to support himself by singing on the streets and in churches, as Luther did a hundred years later. His piety and his poverty are alike attested by his purchase of a pardon at the sale of indulgences at the Wyssehrad in the Prague jubilee year 1393. He says that he spent his last four pennies in purchasing the certificate of forgiveness. Referring probably to the years before his matriculation at the university, he notes in his Bohemian Com-
