Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/86

 If we endeavour to ascertain how great our knowledge of the events of the life of Hus is, we meet with a great contrast. While we have numerous and varied accounts of his later life—the events during his imprisonment can be traced almost day by day—very little is known of the early life of the great Bohemian church-reformer. The almost entirely absent contemporary records are replaced by later legends which are mostly attributable to members of the community of the Bohemian brethren, who believed themselves to have most purely preserved the teaching of Hus. Many of these legends are touching and not devoid of historical value. We are mainly indebted to the careful studies recently published by Professor Flajshans, the greatest authority on Hus of the present day, for whatever knowledge of the youth and early education of Hus we possess.

We are unable to state positively in what year Hus was born. The oldest traditions stated that he was born on July 6, 1373. More recently such great authorities as Palacky and Tomek gave July 6, 1369, as the date of the birth of Hus. According to the latest researches the exact year of his birth cannot be affirmed, but it undoubtedly took place in the period between 1373 and 1375. The day is quite uncertain. The tradition that Hus was born on July 6 is merely founded on a fanciful analogy with the day of his death, which occurred on July 6.

John Hus, or, “of Husinec,” was born in the village of Husinec near the small town of Prachatice, which is not far from the frontiers of Bavaria. This fact deserves notice, as the racial strife which is the keynote of Bohemian history at all periods has always raged most fiercely in those districts where the domains of the Bohemian and German language meet. Husinec and the surrounding district lie on the line of delimitation of the two languages, the Sprachengrenze as it is called in German.

Hus’s father was called Michael, and as it then was