Tell
William, a Swiss peasant of the canton of Uri on Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. According to the tradition current, he lived in the early half of the fourteenth century. Gessler, an insolent bailiff, set his hat on a pole and ordered that no villager pass by without baring his head and bowing respectfully. Tell, a famous hunter and bowman, proudly ignored the order. Gessler arrested Tell and condemned him to shoot an apple from the head of his own son, stationed many yards distant. The boy stood unflinching. The shaft flew true. The craven peasantry could not refrain from expressions of relief and joy. As Tell was about to turn away, a second arrow was noted on his person. "For what purpose?" demanded Gessler. "For thy heart in case my son had been harmed," replied the undaunted Tell. Gessler then ordered Tell to be placed in a boat with himself to be conveyed to prison. During the passage of Lake Lucerne a violent storm arose and Tell, who was a skillful boatman, was freed from his bonds to save the boat and its passengers from destruction. Guiding the boat alongside a sheltering rock, Tell sprang ashore before anyone could stop him, and hastening to a defile through which the party must pass, he awaited Gessler and shot an arrow through his heart.
Tell was instrumental in uniting the four Forest Cantons in opposition to the Austrians, and was an active participant in the battle of Morgarten in 1315, in which 15,000 Austrians were defeated with tremendous loss of life. Tell perished in 1350 while trying to save a drowning man. Although the birthplace of William Tell, the spot where he shot the apple from the head of his son, the rock where he leaped ashore, the defile where Gessler was slain, and the rock in Lake Lucerne where the Swiss conspirators met are all pointed out by popular tradition and are marked by suitable memorials, historians have rejected the Tell story as wholly traditional. Local records give an uninterrupted list of bailiffs, but there is no Gessler. The parish records of births and deaths reveal no William Tell. The historians, or rather chroniclers of the period, do not mention Tell. So far as can be learned his name did not appear in the ballads of the region for a century or two after his supposed death. In a word, documentary evidence is all too recent by centuries to be taken as evidence. Moreover, the story of being given one's freedom as a reward for shooting an apple from the head of a son appears to be widespread among Teutonic people. It is found among the legends of Iceland and Denmark, and in the old English ballads of Adam Bel and Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudesley.