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This daring and sacrilegious act led Frederick the hereditary avoyer of the abbey to place the Waldstaette under the further punishment of the "ban of the empire." Both these sentences were alike fruitless in bringing the peasants to submission to the house of Austria.
It is, of course, quite possible that a Gessler was killed by the peasants, as the name was common enough at the time, but no member of that family the records of which have now been most carefully traced held any office under the Austrians at that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all probable that Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231.
At the period these events were in progress, or, rather, about the time that the Austrian bailies were expelled, toward the close of the thirteenth century, the Emperor's attention was too fully occupied conducting a war against the Bishop of Basel to allow him to enforce his authority among the revolted Waldstaette.
Among the Swiss, Morgarten has always taken the first place in the long record of heroic victories that since 1315 has made the fame of Swiss arms second to none in Europe. This victory at once brought the Waldstaette out of their long obscurity, and placed them in the front rank as powerful and respected states in Switzerland.
On November 3, 1315, Leopold's army reached Baden, where a council was held to determine upon the details of the campaign, a campaign having for its object, as the Duke openly declared, "the extirpation of the whole race of the people of Waldstaette."
Between Einsiedeln and the Waldstaette there had long existed a feeling of bitter hostility, the canons resenting the independent spirit displayed by the peasants, and the latter remembering the many acts of arbitrary oppression they and their ancestors had suffered at the instance of the abbey.
The emergence of the Swiss from slavery to freedom, as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly a gradual process, and there is now every reason for believing that the narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a possible substratum of actual fact.
Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events that befell the Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies, whom they succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived and taken so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom as is popularly assigned to them, they should have been entirely ignored by all contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent ones, for a hundred and fifty or two hundred years yet such is the case.
Neither is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the celebrated Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach, was certainly not built to commemorate the exploits of Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss hero.
The sturdy mountaineers, although numerically weak, proved themselves worthy of their ancient fame. The four Waldstaette were thrown into one canton, Waldstaetten; Glarus and Toggenburg into another, Linth; Appenzell and St. Gall into that of Saentis.
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