The War over the Fish in the Botič

From the days when there were still truly live fish in the Botič, Ruffer relates the following in his History of Vyšehrad. The magistrate of the New Town had a fancy for the fish of the brook and was vexed that only the dean and the canon of Vyšehrad fished there; from 1671 onwards they therefore began to put great obstacles in the chapter's way. On one occasion the dean was fishing in the Botič for his own recreation together with the canon, and someone reported it to the magistrate. Before long some two hundred men of the New Town came rushing from every side — all manner of common folk, boatmen, poachers, millers, day labourers and other such rabble — with assorted weapons, with muskets, firelocks and swords. They poured out of the town by two gates, the Swine Gate and the Vyšehrad Gate, and by a third way through a door in the town walls below Karlov; with terrible din and uproar they drove the dean away from the fish and took his nets — and all of it with the knowledge and on the orders of the New Town council. The chapter then brought a suit against the whole New Town community before the provincial court. The case lasted ten years, and more than eighty assorted letters about the dispute have been preserved; in 1681 judgment was given that the Botič had belonged to the chapter from the beginning, and the New Town had to pay five hundred and fifty gulden.