New Council, The

(Nová rada)

   by Smil Flaˇska

(ca. 1394)

   Nová rada (The new council) is a BEAST FABLE in verse, intended as a political satire on the reign of Wenceslas IV (1361–40), king of Bohemia and sometime Holy Roman Emperor. Its author, Smil Flaˇska of Pardubice, was a Czech noble writing in defense of the traditional rights and privileges of the nobility against the crown.

   Smil’s father was a powerful aristocrat, and his uncle, Ernest of Pardubice, was archbishop of Prague. Smil was educated at Prague University and inherited his father’s lands upon the elder’s death ca. 1389. Ultimately, however, he lost or sold his estates. By the mid-1390s, he had joined the Lords’ Union, a baronial faction opposed to King Wenceslas. The nobles engaged in military action against the king in an attempt to stop the erosion of their rights, particularly regarding inherited property. From 1394 until his death in 1403 at the siege of the king’s city of Kutná Hora, Smil was chief notary of the land court for the Lords’Union. It was early in this period, about 1394, that he wrote The New Council.

   Smil’s poem is a series of 44 counsels presented by birds and other animals who have been drawn together to advise the Lion King. The Lion is clearly representative of Wenceslas, whose coat of arms was the Lion of Bohemia. The animal’s speeches are framed by the Eagle and the Swan, probably representing the Empire and the Church respectively—though the Eagle was also the heraldic symbol of Joˇst of Luxembourg,Wenceslas’s younger brother who led the first baronial rebellion against the king in 1394. Other speakers—the Horse, Wolf, Peacock, Beaver, Nightingale, and so on—are more difficult to identify. It is also sometimes difficult to determine whether the speeches are intended to give the king good advice or to satirize his reign. Accordingly many scholars believe that the text of 1394 is a reworking of an earlier text, perhaps called simply The Counsel, written by the younger Smil and intended as a benevolent “Mirror of Princes”manual for the young King Wenceslas. The extant text, according to this theory, has been added to and revised for the purposes of satirizing the reign of the older King Wenceslas.

   The text as we have it focuses on three major baronial complaints about Wenceslas’s reign: first, that the king had allowed outsiders, foreigners, to become part of his council; second, that he had allowed men to purchase positions in government, particularly in the land courts; and finally, perhaps most significantly, that he had claimed his traditional feudal right to reversion, seizing the property of nobles who had apparently died without legitimate heirs. The third complaint was one that affected Smil’s own family, and he alludes to it in The New Council in the counsel of the Wolf.

   In addition to these major complaints, the animals’ counsels also allude to allegations about very specific personal shortcomings of the king’s, such as his laziness, his drunkenness, his alienation of the church, his penchant for spending time with common people and dressing below his station, and his strange fondness for frequent hot baths (with female bath attendants).Whether or not there was an earlier version of the text, clearly the one that we have is the work of a courtier who has lost faith in a king he believes has forfeited his political and moral authority to rule.

   Bibliography

   ■ Thomas, Alfred. Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Culture and Society, 1310–1420. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.