OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 5 
Concerning Edward’s entire good faith there is no 
more room for doubt. 
Yet another and different kind of example of the 
havoc wrought upon popular opinions by critical 
investigation is furnished by the legend of William 
Tell. To our grandfathers that famous archer was 
as real a personage as Oliver Cromwell, though 
doubts on the subject had been expressed in Switzer- 
land as long ago as 1598, the story was declared to 
be apocryphal by a learned Swiss clergyman, named 
Freuden-Berger, in 1760, and it was completely ex- 
ploded by the Swiss historian Kopp in 1835. The 
persons called William Tell and Gessler never existed 
in Switzerland, contemporary chroniclers never men- 
tion them, the story first appeared in print one hundred 
and seventy-five years after the date, 1307, when its 
events were said to have occurred, and, moreover, it 
was copied from the book of a Danish historian, Saxo 
Grammaticus, written more than a century Jdefore 
1307. In Saxo’s book it is a Danish archer, named 
Palnatoki, who shoots an apple from his son’s head, 
and the incident is placed in the year 950. The 
Swiss story is identical with the Danish story, and 
the latter is simply one version of a legend that is 
found in at least six different Teutonic localities, as 
well as in Finland, Russia, and Persia, and among 
the wild Samoyeds of Siberia. There can be little 
doubt that the story is older than the Christian era, 
and in the course of its wanderings it has been 
attached now to one locality and now to another, 
very much as the jokes and witticisms told a century 
ago of Robert Hall were in recent years ascribed to 
Henry Ward Beecher. 
