Why are there swans in Bruges? The Lanchals legend and what the records say

The legend of the Lanchals swans

The version you hear by the canals fits together a little too well. In 1488 the townspeople, up in arms against Maximilian, killed Pieter Lanchals, the town's schout. When Maximilian regained the upper hand, he imposed a penance that would never end: there would always be swans on the waters of Bruges. And why swans in particular? Because of the surname. In Flemish, Lanchals is very close to lange hals, "long neck", and no bird has a longer neck than a swan.

Some versions even give an exact number of swans. That figure doesn't appear in any source we've been able to read.

Who was Pieter Lanchals?

A man who climbed very high and fell at the worst possible moment. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says he was of humble birth and had worked his way up, through service and shrewdness, to become a knight and the king's master of the household. As schout of Bruges he was something like the town's chief of police, and he also advised Maximilian, the widower of Mary of Burgundy. Large sums of Flemish money went through his hands, and the chronicler says his demands made him deeply hated.

In early 1488 the town rebelled and went as far as detaining Maximilian himself, lodged against his will in the Craenenburg, a spice shop on the Markt. Lanchals was hunted high and low, and anyone who sheltered him was threatened with hanging at their own front door. After five weeks hiding at a capmaker's, he tried to slip away at nightfall wrapped in a short cloak. He was caught. He was tortured on a scaffold in the middle of the Markt, on a rack that, according to Molinet, he had brought in himself, and on 22 March 1488 he was beheaded.

He was laid to rest in the chapel he already owned in the Church of Our Lady, built before 1488. Centuries later, between 1806 and 1979, the same chapel sheltered the tombs of Mary of Burgundy and her father, Charles the Bold.

When did the swan legend begin?

Four hundred years later. The oldest written trace we've found is in Bruges-la-Morte (1892), the novel by Georges Rodenbach that turned Bruges into a melancholy character in its own right. In a night scene, the hero walks along the quays and sees the swans on the canal grow restless. Rodenbach describes them as age-old swans, descended from a coat of arms, which the town was condemned to keep in perpetuity for having unjustly put to death a lord who bore them in his arms. Expiatory swans, he calls them, and he presents it all as something the legend tells. One telling detail: Lanchals's name never comes up.

The name wasn't long in coming. In an unpublished sonnet dated Bruges, 15 October 1893, the poet Julius Sabbe already brings in Lanchals, and Maximilian held in the Craenenburg, watching from the window as his officer is tortured. That scene has no basis either: Molinet doesn't say Maximilian saw it, and by then he places him in another house.

In 1901, a newspaper supplement printed a different swan story, starring one Maria Moreel. The following year the Bruges journal Biekorf settled the matter its own way: the genuine popular tradition of the swans was the Lanchals one, with its "long necks" bred as a sign of penance, and there was no other. Quite a quarrel over the purity of a legend that, as far as we know, had been in print for barely a decade.

Did Lanchals have a swan on his coat of arms?

It seems so, and that may be where the whole thing started. In 1907 Medard Verkest published a long article on Lanchals, describing his arms from a book of nobility: a red shield with a river and, on it, a silver swan swimming. In heraldry that's called canting arms, because the picture spells out the name: the long-necked bird for the man called "long neck". We haven't seen the coat of arms in a document from his own time, so we're telling it for what it is: a heraldic description quoted in 1907.

If that's right, the legend didn't invent the pun. It was already there on Lanchals's own shield. What the legend added was the punishment.

How long have there been swans in Bruges?

Since long before 1488. In the same article, Verkest cited the inventory of the town archives, which lists two entries in the town accounts: one from 1403, about eight swans caught in the moat by the walls, and another from 1474, a payment to the town's servants for catching sixteen swans in the moats. Both come before Lanchals's death. His conclusion, more or less: one more legend that stays a legend, and a pity to lose the poetry.

You'll also often read that, in the early fifteenth century, Bruges bought the right to keep swans from the Count of Flanders. That may be so, but we haven't tracked down the document, so we're not treating it as fact. What is on record is that the swan already had its place in the town's festivities: in 1749, in the great procession for the jubilee of the Holy Blood, the giant animals in the parade included a swan with a girl dressed as a nymph sitting on it, singing.

Fact or legend.

• Fact: Pieter Lanchals, schout of Bruges and adviser to Maximilian, was beheaded by the rebels on 22 March 1488 and buried in his chapel in the Church of Our Lady.
• Fact, according to the archive inventory Verkest quoted in 1907: the town accounts mention swans in the moats in 1403 and 1474, before that death.
• Probable: the swan on Lanchals's coat of arms, described in a book of nobility quoted in 1907.
• Legend: that Maximilian imposed the perpetual keeping of swans on Bruges. Earliest written version we know of: Rodenbach, 1892, without naming Lanchals; with his name, in a sonnet dated 1893.
• No basis: that Maximilian watched from the Craenenburg as Lanchals suffered.
• Unconfirmed: the right to keep swans bought from the Count, and the exact number of swans some versions give.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "The Beguinage and the Lake of Love", at the stop "The Swans of Lanchals", by the Church of Our Lady, next to the Lanchals chapel. His capture and death are told on the Markt, at the stop "The Executioner's Bench" on the route "Bruges in Revolt". And the Minnewater, at the end of the Beguinage route, has a legend of its own, with an author and a date: the story of Minna and the Lake of Love. For the practical side of your trip, see our Bruges guide.

Further reading

• Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, Paris, Flammarion, 1892. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14911
• "De Zwaan", Biekorf 13 (1902), pp. 9–12. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_bie001190201_01/_bie001190201_01_0002.php
• Medard Verkest, "De vogels van Pieter Lanchals", De Vlaamsche Gids 3 (1907), pp. 491–523. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_vla001190701_01/_vla001190701_01_0031.php
• Jean Molinet, Chroniques, vol. III, ed. J.-A. Buchon, Paris, Verdière, 1828. https://archive.org/details/chroniquesdejea04buchgoog
• Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed, "Parochiekerk Onze-Lieve-Vrouw" (ID 82359). https://inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/erfgoedobjecten/82359