suspension bridge across the Menai Straits, begun in 1820, and the Conway Bridge, begun in 1822. While his fame rests chiefly on his road and canal engineering, and the erection of the numerous bridges and aqueducts which this involved, he also did good work in harbour construction. The fisheries and industries of Scotland benefited by the improvements he effected at many of the harbours on the east coast; he constructed the St Katherine's Docks, London (finished in 1828); and his last piece of professional work was a plan for the improvement of Dover harbour. Other achievements of his later years were the drainage of the north level of the eastern Fen district, an area of 48,000 acres, and erection of the Dean Bridge, Edinburgh, and of the Broomielaw Bridge, Glasgow. He died on the 2nd of September 1834 in London, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Telford was never married. For twenty-one years he lived at the Salopian coffee-house, afterwards the Ship Hotel, Charing Cross, whence he removed to 24 Abingdon Street. He was a fellow of the Royal Societies of London and of Edinburgh, and was annually elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers from its foundation. He received the Swedish order of knighthood of Gustavus Vasa.
See Telford's Memoirs, written by himself and edited by John Rickman (1838); also Smiles's Lives of the Engineers.
TÉLIGNY, CHARLES DE (c. 1535-1572), French soldier and diplomat, belonged to a respected Huguenot family of Rouerque, and received an excellent training in letters and arms at the house of Coligny. He was employed on several peace missions; he represented the Protestants before the king, and was entrusted by Condé with the presentation of his terms to the queen-mother in 1567, and in the following year he assisted at the conference at Chalons and signed the peace of Longjumeau, which was destined to be of short duration. On
the outbreak of war, he took part in the siege of Poitiers, directed an unsuccessful attack on Nantes, fought bravely under Coligny at Moncontour, and participated in the negotiations ending in the treaty of Saint-Germain (8th of August 1570). In 1571 he retired to La Rochelle and married Louise de Coligny, but was speedily recalled to Paris to serve on the bi-partisan commission of adjustment. Although he won the special favour of Charles IX., he was one of the first victims
in the massacre of St Bartholomew's Day (24th of August 1572). His remains were taken to the Castle of Téligny in 1617, but eight years later were thrown into the river by the bishop of Castres.
TELL, WILLIAM. The story of William Tell's skill in shooting
at and striking the apple which had been placed on the
head of his little son by order of Gessler, the tyrannical Austrian
bailiff of Uri, is so closely bound up with the legendary history
of the origin of the Swiss Confederation that they must be
considered together. Both appear first in the 15th century,
probably as results of the war for the Toggenburg inheritance
(1436-50); for the intense hatred of Austria, greatly increased
by her support of the claims of Zürich, favoured the circulation
of stories which assumed that Swiss freedom was of immemorial
antiquity, while, as the war was largely a struggle between the
civic and rural elements in the Confederation, the notion that
the (rural) Schwyzers were of Scandinavian descent at once
separated them from and raised them above the German
inhabitants of the towns.
The Tell story is first found in a ballad the first nine stanzas of which (containing the story) were certainly written before 1474. There is no mention made of the names of the bailiff or of his master, or of the hat placed on a pole. Tell is called “the first Confederate,” and his feat is treated as the real and only reason why the Confederation was formed and the tyrants driven out of the land. It is probably to this ballad that Melchior Russ of Lucerne (who began his Chronicle in 1482) refers when, in his account (from Justinger) of the evil deeds of the bailiffs in the Forest districts, he excuses himself from giving the story. He goes on to narrate how Tell, irritated by his treatment, stirred up his friends against the governor, who seized and bound him and was conveying him by boat to his castle on the lake of Lucerne, when a storm arose, and Tell, by reason of his great bodily strength, was, after being unbound, given charge of the rudder on his promise to bring the boat safely to land. He steers it towards a shelf of rock, called in Russ's time Tell's Pktte, springs on shore, shoots the bailiff dead with his crossbow, and goes back to Uri, where he stirs up the great strife which ended in the battle of Morgarten. In these two accounts, which form the basis of the Uri version of the origin of the Confederation, it is Tell and Tell only who is the actor and the leader. We first hear of the cruelties of Austrian bailiffs in the Forest districts in the Bernese Chronicle of Conrad Justinger (1420). No names or details are given, and the dates are different in the two recensions of the Chronicle as “olden days before Bern was founded” (i.e. before 1191) and 1260. Several details, but only one name, are added in the De Nobilitate et Rusticitate Dialogus (cap. 33) of Felix Hemmerli, a canon of Zürich, who wrote it after 1451 and before 1454; in this last year he was imprisoned by the Schwyzers, whom he had repeatedly insulted and attacked in his books. According to him the men of Schwyz and of Unterwalden were the first to rise, those of Uri following suit much later. But neither Justinger nor Hemmerli makes any allusion to Tell or his feat.
The Tell story and the “atrocities” story are first found combined in a MS. known as the White Book of Sarnen. They are contained in a short chronicle written between 1467 and 1476, probably about 1470, and based on oral tradition. Many details are given of the oppressions of the bailiffs: we hear of Gessler, of the meeting of Stoupacher of Schwyz, Fürst of Uri, and a man of Nidwalden at the Rütli, — in fact, the usual version of the legend. To give an instance of tyranny in Uri, the author tells us the story of the refusal of “der Thäll” to do reverence to the hat placed on a pole, of his feat of skill, and of his shooting the bailiff, Gessler, from behind a bush in the “hollow way” near Küssnacht. Tell is represented as being one of those who swore at the Rütli to drive out the oppressors; but the narrative of his doings is merely one incident in the general movement which began quite independently of him. The chronology is very confused, but the events are placed after Rudolf's election to the empire in 1273. This is the only account in which Tell is called “der Thäll,” which name he himself explains by saying, “If I were sharp (witzig) I should be called something else and not der Tall,” i.e. the simpleton or slow-witted man. (It is worthy of notice that the same meaning is attributed to the name of Tokko, the hero of a similar legend in Gheysmer's abridgment of the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, which may, somehow, have influenced the Swiss version.) The only other known instances of the Uri version of the legend relating to the origin of the Confederation are the Latin hexameters of Glareanus (1515), in which Tell is compared to Brutus as “assertor patriae, vindex ultorque tyrannum,” and the Urnerspiel (composed in 1511-12), a play acted in Uri, in which Russ's version is followed, though the bailiff, who is unnamed, but announces that he has been sent by Albert of Austria, is slain in the “hollow way.” Tell is the chief of the Rütli leaguers, and it is his deed which is the immediate occasion of the rising against the oppressors, which is dated in 1296. Mutius (1540) is the latest writer who, in his description of the origin of the Confederation, does not mention Tell and his act. The two stories are now firmly bound together; the version contained in the White Book is the accepted one, though small additions in names and dates are often made.
The task of filling up gaps, smoothing away inconsistencies, rounding off the tale, was accomplished by Giles Tschudi (q.v.), whose recension was adopted, with a few alterations, by Johannes von Müller in his History of the Confederation (1780). In the final recension of Tschudi's Chronicle (1734-36), which, however, differs in many particulars from the original draft still preserved at Zürich, we are told how Albert of Austria, with the view of depriving the Forest lands of their ancient freedom, sent bailiffs (among them Gessler) to Uri and Schwyz, who committed many tyrannical acts, so that finally on
