While then there was a direct and vital influence from the work of the English reformer which gave to his teachings partial identity with those of his Bohemian successors, the movement led by these was still quite independent and national. The central figure of the Bohemian Reformation was John Huss, or Hus, the son of a peasant. He was born in 1369 at Husinetz--of which his own name is a contraction--in Southern Bohemia. The principal events of his life, from the time that he took his degree at the University of Prague until his death at the stake, July 6, 1415, will be found in Trench's sympathetic but discriminating narrative. If we look for the proper forerunners of Huss, his true spiritual ancestors, we shall find them in his own land, in a succession of earnest and faithful preachers--among these Militz (d. 1374) and Janow (d. 1394) stand out the most prominently--who had sown seed which could hardly have failed to bear fruit sooner or later, though no line of Wycliffe's writings had ever found its way to Bohemia. This land, not German, however it may have been early drawn into the circle of German interests, with a population Slavonic in the main, had first received the faith through the preaching of Greek monks. The Bohemian Church probably owed to this fact that, though incorporated from the first with the churches of the West, uses and customs prevailed in it--as the preaching in the mother tongue, the marriage of the clergy, communion in both kinds--which it only slowly and unwillingly relinquished. It was not till the fourteenth century that its lines were drawn throughout in exact conformity with those of Rome. All this deserves to be kept in mind; for it helps to account for the kindly reception which the seed sown by the later Bohemian reformers found, falling as this did in a soil to which it was not altogether strange.