As the kings of the Luxemburg dynasty in the fourteenth century had tried to develop monarchical power on the basis of feudal ties with the landowning classes, so they had built a separate set of royal institutions alongside those already in existence. Royal government had jurisdiction over ecclesiastical lands, royal towns and estates, including those held as fiefs of the crown. Here the king was sovereign and absolute ruler; disputes regarding property in these categories were heard in royal courts. But in the government of the country supreme power lay in the high court (zemsky soud). This met four times a year and had jurisdiction over all free landholders, barons, knights and gentry; even the king could be cited before it. At the head of the country’s government was a committee of four chief officials whose membership rotated among the old baronial families. The chief burgrave presided over the court in the king’s absence, and summoned armies needed to keep the peace. The chief chamberlain issued summonses, arranged judicial investigations, conducted hearings and pronounced the verdicts of the court. The chief judge named the juries and supervised the court’s proceedings with an eye to traditional legal formalities. The chief notary recorded the court’s actions. The same prominent families claimed the right to govern the twelve districts into which the country’s administration was divided.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century the nobility was putting the finishing touches to its successful struggle with King Wenceslas in which it had seen itself acting on behalf of the whole community. The nobles had contested the monarch’s power from 1394 to 1405, accusing him of threatening their allodial property, of opening his council to foreigners and of permitting men amenable to bribery to serve in the royal court to the detriment of the interests of long-standing noble families, to whom the king’s policies were destructive of the welfare of the realm. So, in their pact of 1394, they had claimed to seek the good of the country, to promote and effect true justice within it, and always to stand by it together, so as to keep zealously as our goal the welfare of the country ... If anyone should try in any way to oppress any one of us or of our men, against the custom of the land or against the law defined by the lords of the country’s court, we promise to help our fellows faithfully.
For the nobles, the national good meant that they controlled the government. Among the twenty-one demands of 1394, to which the king acquiesced in 1405, six concerned the filling of governmental offices. Article fifteen was representative; it read:
The office of the burgrave of Prague is to be held by a native lord as of old, and he shall be placed in this office with the counsel of the lords ... The same goes for the other offices that the lords have held from of old; to all such offices a noble-born lord is to be named.
Wenceslas was also required to stop appointing gentry and townsmen to his high council. The lords further demanded that traditional procedures in the running of the courts be restored, that the law, according to ancient custom, be applied and that royal officials should not interfere in the government of regional districts. To them, tradition and custom once again meant noble control. In 1405 the king, for the good of the whole country as he put it, finally agreed to these demands. Henceforth the barons had to approve any appointment to the royal council. A ruling against the king in a property dispute in December 1405 underlined clearly the king’s position in the realm as merely the first among equals. Shortly after the baronial victory, Czechs became preoccupied with issues of religious reform. In that process, the baronage came under pressure from Hussite reformers to revise fundamentally and to extend its understanding of the national community along lines of language and religious belief so as to include all social groups.