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 this Agreement they guaranteed to each other full liberty of religious worship, which was to be extended to the peasants also; the full right of the Protestants to appoint priests to the livings in their gift was recognized, and it was further agreed that on the lands of the crown both religious parties should be allowed to worship freely according to their creed, and to build churches.

This last provision requires special notice. The great Hussite revolution had been followed by a complete confiscation of the property of the Romanist Church in Bohemia; the poverty of the clergy being one of the most important points of the early Hussite creed, and one that is specially referred to in the Compacts. Through the good-will of King Sigismund and his successors—all of whom, with the exception of George of Poděbrad, were Romanists—the Catholic Church had again received gifts of land and other property. These gifts were, however, assumed to have been made temporarily to individuals, and the Church property continued legally to be a portion of the lands of the crown; this fiction was undoubtedly maintained out of respect to the strong feeling of the utraquists on this matter.

For the same reason the clergy did not, till after the complete reaction which followed the battle of the White Mountain, constitute one of the Estates of the realm. The right of building churches, granted to those who dwelt on the lands of the crown, therefore included those who lived on land owned by the Church. It is this question that was—nine years later—the immediate cause of the Thirty Years' War, the Archbishop of Prague having caused the Protestant Church of Hrob to be destroyed while the Abbot of Břevnov closed a church in the town of Broumov which was under his authority.