How much the sense of equality before the law grew under this administration may be illustrated by the following instance. A servant has brought an action against a fellow-servant for wounding him; while at the same time a master brings an action against the same defendant for debt. The question arises which of these shall be heard first. The jury decide that “since the body of a man is more precious than money,” the defendant should answer for his violence to the man whom he has wounded, before he answers to the master for his debt. More bold still was the assertion of the rights of the citizens to hold the nobles responsible to the city tribunals for lands held within the city. And while they held their own against the nobles outside, the popular magistrates increased their authority within the city. The power of regulating trade, which in England was seized by the Guilds, was, in the Moravian towns, at once taken into the hands of the civic authorities; and thus those conflicts, which Mrs. Green has described as prevailing in so many English towns, between the magistrates and the leaders of the trades, never assume such prominence in the history of Brünn and Olmütz. Nor was it only in their immediate security for liberty and good government that these civic rights were of advantage to Bohemia and Moravia. Questions were forced upon the practical consideration of the jurors, the very discussion of which formed an important element in political education. Thus the treatment by the jurors of the questions of the value of torture, and ordeal by battle, as methods of discovering truth, show how experience was already preparing the way for the overthrow of abuses, which were yet too strongly supported by popular prejudice to be removed at once. The steady growth of these liberties, which had received so powerful an impulse from the needs produced by the Tartar invasion, was still further promoted by Pr̆emysl Ottakar II., and became in his hands part of a complete scheme for humbling the power of the nobility. Wenceslaus, in spite of some fine qualities, had been a self-indulgent and pleasure-seeking man; and he had, like some of his predecessors, mortgaged many of the royal lands and castles to the nobles. This had naturally increased their power, and had enabled them to organise those insurrections against the king in which they had at first succeeded in involving his son. But even while he was still Margrave of Moravia, young Pr̆emysl Ottakar had broken loose from these influences; and by various economies and convenient pecuniary transactions he had succeeded in raising money enough to purchase back the lands from the nobles, compelling them, sometimes against their will, to surrender their mortgages. He also forced them to break down those castles which had been great causes of disorder and weakness in the country. Nor did he fail to strengthen his cause by alliance with the clergy.