Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/478

450 significance, for it did not originate in Prague but was transferred there after the union of the State of the Lemusi with that of the Chekhs of Central Bohemia. And it was disagreeable to the later Přemyslids. King Wenzel I (1230-1253), who was German in feeling, was ashamed of his origin, causing his peasant kinsmen to be driven from Staditzi and giving the village to the Germans. But he does not seem to have touched the bast relics; the kinsmen appear to have recovered their heritage, for in the year 1359 the Emperor Charles IV, as king of Bohemia, declared to the sons of Radosta, co-heirs of Staditzi, that they and their forefathers had always been free heirs of their tax-free estates; but as these had not long since been illegally given away and burdened with taxation by his father, the blind King John (who fell at Crécy, 1346), Charles IV now restores their rights, but retains as crown-land the field which Přemysl had once tilled single-handed (it is to this day called the "king's field") and charges the petitioners with the care of Přemysl's hazel stock, all the nuts from which they have to present yearly at the royal table as a memorial of an event so remarkable.

The peasant origin of the Přemyslids and the Piasts cannot be an invention of the chroniclers. No high-born dynasty would believe such a story, rather it would make short work of such blasphemy against its kingly majesty. The chroniclers merely decked the fact out with the fruits of their reading in ancient classics, and the Church interpreted it in the sense of Christian humility.

The peasant prince, Přemysl, was not prince of the whole of Bohemia — which even much later consisted of several little States — but originally only of the little people of the Lemusi round Bilin in North-West Bohemia, in immediate proximity to the Sorb clan Glomachi (German Daleminzen) in the modern kingdom of Saxony. These Glomachi like the Lower Styrians remained under župans, but their social organisation was more complicated. Under German domination they fell into the three classes: (1) Supani (Lat. seniores, German eldesten), (2) Withasii (Slav, vićazi) in equis servientes (servants on horseback, esquires), and (3) the Smurdi, correctly smrdi, that is the "stinkers," the common peasant-folk. In addition, there were corresponding to the German occupation members of German nationality: (4) the Censuales (German lazze), and (5) the Proprii (heyen). The three Slav classes were under the special jurisdiction of župans with Slavonic as official language. The Daleminzian župans and smurdi corresponded to the two Lower Styrian classes, the župans as former domini (seniores) of Avaro-Bulgar origin; they were likewise very numerous but their percentage cannot now be ascertained. On the other hand, the Withasii were of Germanic Norse origin. The Vikings somewhere in Russia must have subjected the forefathers of the Glomachi, and been transplanted with them by the Avars after the year 563 to serve as a barrier against the Franks on