Legend dates William Tell's apple shot to this day
On this day · 18 November 1307
Swiss tradition fixes the famous crossbow shot — apple, son, and all — to November 18, 1307, though history can't confirm Tell existed.
Swiss legend holds that on November 18, 1307, the marksman William Tell was forced to shoot an apple off his own son’s head with a crossbow.
The story goes that Tell refused to bow to a hat raised on a pole by Gessler, the tyrannical Habsburg reeve at Altdorf in the canton of Uri. As punishment, Gessler set an impossible test: split an apple balanced on the boy’s head, or both would die. Tell took aim and struck the fruit without harming a hair on his son.
The exact date, 18 November 1307, was supplied by the chronicler Aegidius Tschudi around 1570 — more than 250 years after the supposed event.
There is no contemporary evidence that Tell ever lived, and historians treat the tale as folklore that crystallized national identity rather than recorded fact. Still, the apple-shot endures as a defiant emblem of Swiss independence, retold in Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play and Rossini’s opera.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
