Baumgarten kills the seneschal Wolfshot

Conrad Baumgarten kills the seneschal Wolfshot after his wife escapes an encounter in which the seneschal has ordered a bath prepared and behaved improperly toward her. Baumgarten’s account links her flight from the house to his armed pursuit and the seneschal’s death by axe; Werni then declares that no one can blame the deed. The brief recollection makes the wife’s report, rather than any prior dispute described in the passage, the immediate cause of the killing.

Circumstances and Cause

Baumgarten begins with his own whereabouts: he was in the forest felling timber when his wife came running to him in fear. Her sudden arrival establishes the urgency of what follows and places Baumgarten away from the house when the incident began. The passage does not describe what happened between the wife and the seneschal directly; readers receive it through the account she gives her husband.

According to Baumgarten, the seneschal had been in his house and ordered his wife to prepare a bath. He then behaved toward her in a way Baumgarten presents as improper. The wife escaped and fled to her husband. The sequence is specific: an order issued in the household, conduct that she rejected, and flight that carried her to Baumgarten. The text supplies no further detail about the encounter and does not name the wife.

Baumgarten’s Response

Baumgarten says he was armed when he went after the seneschal, and identifies his axe as the weapon with which he killed him. His account moves directly from his wife’s escape to his pursuit; it gives no intervening conversation, deliberation, or attempt at another remedy. The killing is thus presented as an immediate response to the news she brings, although the passage does not state a formal legal justification or describe any later inquiry.

The contrast between the domestic setting of the reported misconduct and the forest where Baumgarten had been working sharpens the account’s causal structure. His wife crosses from the house to him; he then turns from his work to seek the seneschal. The axe, introduced as the instrument of the killing, connects the practical circumstances of Baumgarten’s work to the decisive violence of his response without elaborating on the act itself.

Reception and Dramatic Function

After Baumgarten finishes, Werni answers that he did well and that no one can blame the deed. That response gives the episode an immediate communal judgment: within this exchange, Werni treats Baumgarten’s action as defensible in light of the circumstances he has reported. His approval is not presented as a formal ruling, and the passage offers no dissenting response or account of consequences beyond this exchange.

The episode reaches the audience as a spoken recollection rather than a staged confrontation. Its compressed chain of report, escape, pursuit, and killing gives the action a clear cause while keeping the seneschal’s conduct and the death itself undescribed in detail. Werni’s reply closes the recollection by shifting attention from what Baumgarten did to how those hearing him assess it.