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
Flaˇ ska 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.