rector and beadles often proved unable to maintain order, and in 1374 the authorities of the university came to an agreement with those of the city, according to which the city-guards were empowered to arrest and hand over to the custody of the rector turbulent and riotous students. Other complaints also were made against the members of the new university. It was stated that they were followed everywhere by numerous undesirable female companions.[1] It must, however, be stated in defence of the students that the example given them by the clergy of Prague was not a very edifying one.
It was for this turbulent and sensuous capital that the youthful south Bohemian peasant John left the quiet of his native Husinec. Of his early student-days we possess somewhat touching reminiscences, which are scattered throughout his writings. It is a peculiarity of Hus that he always writes of his actions with a truly saintly humility, exaggerating in an almost childlike fashion every little misdeed, or what he considered as such. He, on the other hand, always takes much trouble to conceal the strenuous work and bitter self-renunciation which were the principal features of his student-life at Prague. In a spirit that almost appears inspired by personal animosity, recent German writers have laid great stress on Hus’s very innocent confessions. The son of poor parents, Hus endured the sufferings of poverty and even of hunger,[2] and was often obliged to sleep on the bare ground and even reduced to begging in the streets—not, it
- ↑ The parishioners of St. Nicholas in the old town declared: “Quod multae domus sunt in parochia ipsorum et aliis, ubi studentes morantur, et rara domus est in quibus morantur in qua non foverent meretrices publicas, de quo multi homines scandalizantur." Quoted by Tomek, Dejepis Mesta Prahy, vol. iii. p. 284, n.
- ↑ Hus refers in his quaint manner to this time when his only food consisted of a scant pittance of bread and peas. “As I,” he writes, “when I was a hungry little student, made a spoon out of bread till I had eaten the peas, and then I ate the spoon also.” Vyklad desatera bozieho prikazanie (Exposition of the Ten Commandments), chap, lxxvii. p. 278, of Erben’s edition.
