The Hussite movement was older than Hus, and it was [Sidenote: The Hussite movement.] partly native and partly foreign in its origin. The first impulse to religious reform is to be found, in Bohemia as in England, in the dissensions between the parish clergy and the mendicant orders. The latter, being in immediate dependence upon the Papacy, were not subject to the ordinary authority of the bishops, and soon learned to consider themselves superior to the parish clergy. The bishops usually supported their own dependants, while the friars often found a powerful ally in the Pope. One result of this long-standing quarrel was that the people learned to question the authority of their ecclesiastical superiors. Wherever it is necessary or possible to take one of two sides, a certain amount of thought and independence is called into exercise by the choice. This first questioning spirit among the Bohemians was taken advantage of by a series of reforming teachers in the fourteenth century, of whom the best known are Konrad Waldhäuser, Milecz of Kremsier, and Mathias of Janow. These men attacked the degradation of the Church, the vices of monks and friars, the wealth and worldliness of the higher clergy. But it was not until the rise of Hus that there was any system in the demand for reform, or any cohesion among the reformers. And the systematic teaching of Hus was for the most part derived from the great English teacher, John Wyclif. It was a rule in the University of Prague that Bachelors of Arts might not deliver their own lectures, but must expound the teaching of distinguished professors either of Prague, Paris, or Oxford. The marriage of Anne of Bohemia, Wenzel’s sister, with Richard II. led to considerable intercourse between England and Bohemia. Many Bohemian students, notably the friend and disciple of Hus, Jerome of Prague, completed part of their course in Oxford, and returned to their native land carrying with them Wyclif’s treatises, or the record and recollection of his oral teaching. Wyclif, like the Bohemian reformers, had begun by quarrelling with the friars and denouncing the vices of the clergy. The disputes with the Avignon Popes had led him on to attack the extreme claims of papal authority: and gradually he had come to question some of the most prominent dogmas of the Church, notably that of transubstantiation. Hus was at first reluctant to accept all the conclusions of Wyclif, but he advanced step by step in the same direction, and in the end it was as the avowed disciple of the English reformer that he became the leader of a religious party in Bohemia.