[3] His radical ideas eventually brought about his death by execution as a heretic to the church, but made him a martyr for the Protestant Reformation and followers of Jan Hus (known as Hussites).

[citation needed] He was well-educated and spent most of his life traveling, trying to incite religious reform in various cities.

He earned popular renown, as his rhetoric and oratory skills were acclaimed and often roused the public into demonstrations against the church, although they sometimes ended badly.

In 1401 he returned to Prague, but in 1402 visited England, where, at Oxford University, he copied out the Dialogus and Trialogus of John Wycliffe, and thus evinced his interest in Lollardry.

Early in January 1410, he made a cautious speech in favour of Wycliffe's philosophical views, and this was cited against him at the Council of Constance four years later.

In March 1410, a papal bull against Wycliffe's writings was issued, and on the charge of favouring them, Jerome was imprisoned in Vienna, but managed to escape to Moravia.

Popular legend attributes to Jerome leadership of a protest in which papal bulls were first strung around the neck of a prostitute in a cart and then carried to the pillory in Prague to be publicly burned, but the leader was actually Wok of Waldstein.

The hearing was postponed three days later, he was allowed to speak: he remembered the fate of Socrates, Plato's imprisonment, the tortures suffered by Anaxagoras and Zeno, the death of Boethius and the condemnations of John the Baptist, of Christ and of saint Stephen.

[11][12][13] Everyone was waiting for him to admit and retract his errors and ask for forgiveness but "in the end he began to praise a certain John Hus, who had been condemned to the stake and said he had been a good man, just, holy and not worthy of that death.

In public sessions of the council on 11 and 23 September 1415 Jerome abjured his heresies and renounced Wyclif and Hus.

In letters to the king of Bohemia and the University of Prague, he declared that he had become convinced that Hus had been rightfully burned for heresy.

On the second day he withdrew his recantation, and as a result, having "again fallen" back into heresy, he was condemned by the council and handed over to the secular authorities to be burned.