he could to induce the great landed nobles to follow his example in these matters, and to pay more heed to the cultivation of their property, and to the peasants who laboured for them, than they had been in the habit of doing.

One day, so the story goes, he invited a number of distinguished nobles to dine with him in one of the northerly counties, and when the meal was ended he distributed among them a number of pick-axes and[Pg 35] spades, and taking one himself, called on them to join him in clearing away the underwood and digging up the ground.

[Pg 35]

The active young king, who was well accustomed to exert himself, worked away energetically; but the well-fed, self-indulgent lords almost melted away, the labour made them so hot, and very soon they were completely exhausted.

"That's enough, my friends," said the king, observing the state they were in. "Now we know a little of what it costs the peasants to produce that which we waste in idleness while they live in poverty. They are human beings like ourselves, yet we often treat them worse than we do our horses and dogs."

The spot where Matthias read his nobles this wholesome lesson is still pointed out in Gömör.

But indeed some of them needed sharper teaching than this, and Matthias did not scruple to give it them.

Where was the use of the peasant's ploughing and sowing his fields or planting and tending his orchards and vineyards, where was the use of trying to encourage trade and manufactures, when at any moment the farmer, merchant, peddler, might be set upon and robbed of all his hardly-earned goods? Yet so it[Pg 36] was; for in some parts of the country, especially in the north, there were robber-knights and freebooting nobles, chiefly Bohemians, who had been invited into the country during the civil wars, and now, finding their occupation gone, had built themselves strongholds among the mountains, from which they issued forth to plunder and rob and often to murder travellers, traders, farmers, and any one they could lay hands on. Yet these same robbers were many of them men of noble birth, and there were some who were not ashamed to make their appearance in the courts of law, and to help in bringing smaller thieves and robbers to justice.

[Pg 36]

Now King Matthias was so true a lover of justice that his name has become a proverb, and when he died there was a general 

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