Abstrakt
Written, pictorial, archaeological and other material evidence suggests that a manuscript kept in the Prague Castle Archives (H.15) was probably bound at the request of a knightly diplomat. He was in connection with the Imperial-Bohemian, French and English courts, probably at the end of the 1390s or in the 1400s.
His travel diary, which constitutes the last quire of the manuscript, can be seen as a testimony of how a Bohemian knight would have looked at England at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He was interested not only in castles, palaces and Arthurian legends but also the churches, relics and miracles connected with them, which suggests that he combined his diplomatic mission with a pilgrimage.
His journey also confirms the notion that although Bohemia and England lost their close dynastic link after the death of queen Anne, the contacts established in the previous years had by no means been lost by 1394. The situation was only changed by the Hussite wars (1419-36).
The knightly member of the diplomatic mission sent by the Bohemian King George of Poděbrady to England in the mid-1460s also left written accounts of London, which resemble in many respects the analysed diary but, by contrast, do not even mention Queen Anne.