Viktorin Kornel ze Všehrd (of Všehrdy) or simply Všehrd (1460-1520), was a Czech humanist and lawyer, working towards the end of the 15th century as Vice-scribe at the Land Court in the Prague Castle. He is famous for the most penetrating analysis of the Czech common law that he has put forward on some 460 pages under the title "On the Laws of the Czech Land Nine Books" („O právích země české knihy devatery"). He has also translated some Latin texts.
Life
Viktorin Kornelius was born in 1460 in the burgher Utraquist (moderate Hussite) environment of the East-Bohemian town of Chrudim. Having graduated from the Faculty of Arts of the then Utraquist University of Prague, Všehrd gained a wider outlook and capacities of generalization - preconditions for asking, reflecting on as well as answering a number of questions the previous authors of law books from the ranks of nobility had not arrived at.
After 1487 Všehrd held the Office of the Land Boards on the Prague Castle and from 1493 to 1497, during the vacant post of the scribe, he held the post of Vice-scribe at the Land Court in the Prague Castle. The Land Boards with rulings of the Land Court, which were to be burnt during the later great fire of Prague Castle in 1541, had decayed into a flimsy and bad state even before Všehrd's activities. Lawyers in the land routinely used the mere digests of rulings in the form of subject- or alphabetically ordered registers. These attitudes and Všehrd's recording of legal documents led to his dismissal from the Land Court in 1497. Nevertheless, in the course of his appointment he had managed to collect enough material to write his scholarly treatise. Having finished the treatise in 1501, he offered it to the public to be copied freely. He explicitly granted the results of his work for the defense of good and just people "so that they would be able to protect themselves against evil and wilful people." Having lost his position, Všehrd successfully carried on his legal and financial practice.
He died of plague on 21 September 1520 and is buried in historical Lesser Town of Prague, in the Romanesque-Gothic, church of John the Baptist (now Czechoslovak Hussite "Kostel svatého Jana Křtitele Na prádle", Malá Strana.)
Opus Magnum
Assets of Czech Common Law
If, today, legal systems of European origin are usually divided into civil law originated in the framework of late Roman positive law with codified written principles and the English common law, giving precedential authority to prior court decisions, the latter practices were in older times not quite exclusive for England. Such systems dominated in the historic lands of the Kingdom of Bohemia as late as the beginnings of the Modern Age, and even longer in the then Polish and Hungarian lands. Common law was abolished by Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II only after the loss of national sovereignty in 1627 – some years after the fateful defeat in the Battle of White Mountain (1620).