History. Probably the first instance in which the English and the Bohemians came into contact with each other, although as foes on the field of battle, occurred in 1346 at the battle of Crécy. Here fell, fighting on the side of the French, against the English, John of Luxemburg, the blind King of Bohemia. King John’s crest was three ostrich feathers and his motto “I serve”; which the Prince of Wales and his successors adopted in memorial of this great victory of the English.
A more agreeable event in the relationship of England and Bohemia took place thirty-six years later (1382), when Richard II. engaged himself to Anne of Luxemburg, the granddaughter of the very ruler whom the English had fought at Crécy. The popular though erroneous belief is that through Queen Anne the writings of Wicliffe were introduced into Bohemia. In her readable Lives of the Queens of England, Agnes Strickland devotes a few warmly written pages to “Anne of Bohemia, surnamed the Good, first Queen of Richard II.”
The gallant knight, Sir Simon Burley, the English ambassador, was charged with bringing Richard’s bride from Prague to London. “England was to Bohemia a sort of terra incognita; and as a general knowledge of geography and statistics was certainly not among the list of imperial accomplishments in the fourteenth century, the empress (Anne’s mother) despatched duke Primislaus of Saxony on a voyage of discovery, to ascertain, for the satisfaction of herself and the princess what sort of country England might be.”[2]
England may have seemed an out of the way land to the Bohemians of old, yet the English people were by no means unknown to them. The fondness of the Bohemians for travel in foreign countries was well known.[3] That entertaining compilation of wonder-stories comprised in Sir John Mandeville’s Travels was translated at an early date into the national language. Students from Bohemia were wont to go to the universities at Oxford and Paris in order to broaden their education. Jerome of Prague is known to have studied at Oxford. Like others of his countrymen he had been drawn thither by the fame of Wicliff’s name.
Most readers will be surprised to learn that a Bohemian had been one of the torchbearers of Reformation in Scotland. The name of this minor reformer is Paul of Kravař or Crawar, as Scotch writers spell the name. According to Burton[4] “Crawar was a German, believed to have come from Bohemia to propose the doctrines that had been preached by John Hus and Jerome of Prague. All that we are told of him personally is that he professed to be a physician, and to be traveling and visiting in the practice of his calling.” Kravař was burned at St. Andrews, July 23, 1433, as a heretic Hussite. “The churchman who records his burning,” relates Burton, “takes occasion to enlarge on the characteristics of Taborites and other Bohemian heretics.” Lang[5] states that “he was an envoy of the Hussite ‘miscreants.’ Lawrence of Lindores attacked him, but he found him well read in scriptures.”
John Hus
Portrait by Hans Holbein