Thus, in the case of Bohemia, though we get continual hints of national feeling and popular aspiration, these do not always centre in legally constituted bodies, nor do they keep pace with any orderly line of constitutional development. Assemblies seem constantly to have met, but these were, in the main, assemblies of nobles; and the general national feeling more often took the form of an enthusiasm for the Bohemian language, or the reverence for a native saint, than of a demand for the extension of the rights of any class, or for a limitation of the royal power. Perhaps it was a natural consequence of this popular indifference to political progress, as compared with the zeal for the preservation of the national language, and the religious ritual, that, by the close of the twelfth century, we find few traces remaining of those free institutions which seemed to connect themselves with the story of Libus̆a. Even those securities for popular freedom, which undoubtedly prevailed in historical times, had been, in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, corrupted into new sources of tyranny. Of these the most important had been the Z̆upa, or local assembly. This had been formed partly for purposes of self-defence, partly for ecclesiastical organisation; and, though it had centred at one time in a castle, at another in a church, yet it had originally been governed by a judge, elected by the district. But from the time of Boleslav the Cruel, the Dukes began to make it their practice to grant these local judgeships to nobles who had done them special service; and those nobles were generally allowed either to sell their offices or to bequeath them to their heirs. The temptation to use this position as an instrument of oppression was yet further increased by the profit which the judges were allowed to make out of the fines that they had inflicted. The money thus accumulated was often used for the purchase of neighbouring lands; and thus lands formerly held by freemen, or on the communal system, passed into the power of the official nobles. In the meantime those nobles, who did not become Z̆upani, were able to profit by the growing unpopularity of the local tribunals to strengthen the power of their own feudal courts over their dependants; while the continual wars, and the practice of selling captives into slavery, encouraged the growth of an even more helpless and degraded class. The coolness with which many of the grants of land transfer workmen of various kinds as mere appendages of fields and fishponds, is in itself a proof of the degraded position to which the peasant class in Bohemia had been reduced; and the fact that military service seemed one of the few means of escaping from serfdom led the peasants to favour those wars which in the end increased their misery.