Mountains are Free

I genuinely thought this story was 100% fiction until the final four chapters. Admittedly, it still might be  complete fiction since William Tell is sort of just a legend, right? Maybe based on an actual man, but we're talking 1300s so who knows? I generally don't love stories set in the middle ages - they're always so bleak and hopeless and make me feel cold and dirty. I maybe appreciated this one more only because it told an actual story of the Swiss people fighting for their freedom. And Bruno, the main character, is pretty likeable.

Brief summary of Mountains are Free. I have decided it is actually two different books.

Book 1: Chapters 1-7. A mountain-born Swiss boy named Bruno lives with his neighbor, William Tell (who I didn't connect to THE William Tell until the end, as mentioned above), after he is orphaned. He decides to go work for an Austrian lord when they meet in the mountains which he and I realize almost immediately is a horrible idea. The Lord - Rupprecht - is cruel and lives in the feudal system like most of Europe (?) which is completely foreign to Bruno who has always lived as a freeman and goat herder in the Swiss mountains. Bruno travels with him to the Duke of Valberg's castle in Austria and befriends Kyo, a court minstrel, and Zelina, a young ward of the Duke. He witnesses poverty and cruelty from the lords to the peasants and even tries to run away back to the mountains once and is only saved from the dungeon (donjon) by his friend, Kyo. Then, finally, on the night of Zelina's hasty marriage to Rupprecht, the three friends manage to escape the castle in the bustle of an impending war and return to Bruno's home in the mountains of Switzerland.

Book 2: Chapters 8-10. William Tell and other freemen in Switzerland get tired of Austrian vassals trying to take away their freedom. The author tells the famous story of bailiff Gessler forcing William Tell to shoot an arrow off his son's head (as punishment for not bowing to Gessler's hat in the marketplace) and then Tell's admission that he pulled two arrows because he would have shot Gessler with the second if he missed the apple. The Swiss farmers and freemen then fight the bailiffs and Austrian lords placed in their mountains and win! And then a decade later an Austrian army comes to fight them and they win again! Then they are left alone for the next century.

Can you tell why it felt like two different books? Admittedly, Bruno does fight in one of the battles in the latter chapters, but it doesn't even feel like it's about him anymore. His story essentially ends when he returns to the mountains.

Conclusion: 
I'm so glad I don't live in the middle ages.