Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/110

 Wyclif’s books gathered up and burned, and forbidding all preaching except in the cathedral, collegiate, parochial and conventual churches. The document repeatedly called Wyclif heresiarch and condemned as containing heretical statements seventeen of his writings, including the Trialogus. Dialogus, the de corpore Christi, and a volume of his sermons, and ordered all copies of them brought to the archbishop’s palace within six days. All who retained in their possession books of Wyclif were to be solemnly excommunicated in the churches of Prague with the ringing of bells and the dashing of lighted candles to the ground. All communication with such persons was forbidden—in meat and drink, in talk and conversation, in buying and selling, on the street and marketplace, at the fire or bath—cibo, potu, oratione, locutione, emptione, venditione, via, foro, igne, balneo. So little suspicion did Huss have that he was in error that he carried his own copies of Wyclif to Zbynek, asking him to point out the errors in them.

These fulminations were met by Huss in an appeal to the pope on the ground that the pope had been falsely and badly informed and in a similar appeal to the archbishop on the same ground. The excitement in the city was intense and a distinct party was developed which stood by Huss. Within five days of the publication of Zbynek’s decree, the rector and the community of teachers and scholars of the university joined in a solemn refusal to comply with the archbishop’s demands on the ground that the royal and papal charter gave the archbishop no authority over the university in the matter of teachings and books. The latter came under the jurisdiction of the civil, not the ecclesiastical, authorities. The university appealed to the king for protection and the king went so far as to persuade the archbishop to withhold the execution of his decree until Margrave Jostof Moravia, a man