Why are so many pubs called the Swan?

The short answer

A swan is on the sign because the bird belonged to somebody. By prerogative the Crown claims every unmarked mute swan swimming in open water in this country, a right the Royal Household dates to the twelfth century, and for the whole of the late Middle Ages a swan was a bird you had to be entitled to own, kill or serve. Our census of OpenStreetMap on 10 September 2026 counted 309 pubs called the Swan, the White Swan or the Black Swan across the United Kingdom and Ireland — third of the twenty names we counted, behind the Red Lion at 474 and the Royal Oak at 391, and the commonest bird on a British pub sign by a wide margin.

Two separate things put it there, and both are documented. One is ownership: a swan meant a great household’s table. The other is heraldry: a chained white swan was the badge of the de Bohuns and then of the house of Lancaster, and it was handed out to men who were expected to wear it.

The bird that was property

The legal position is unusually clear for something this old. Swans in open water belong to the Crown unless somebody can show a grant or a prescriptive claim, a rule set out in The Case of Swans, reported by Sir Edward Coke in 1592. Until the sixteenth century the right to the swans on a given stretch of water was commonly granted away to landowners, and a few of those grants survive: the swannery at Abbotsbury in Dorset was given its rights in the fourteenth century, and two livery companies of the City of London — the Vintners and the Dyers — have held theirs since the fifteenth. They are the only bodies that still exercise them, and they share the Thames swans with the King.

Those grants existed because swans were food at the top of the market, roasted for banquets and feasts, and a household that could put one on the table was announcing something about itself. A white bird with a gold collar round its neck is also, flatly, one of the easiest things in the world to paint on a board and recognise from the other end of a street, which is the practical test every old pub name has to pass.

Two nicks, not two necks

The ownership marks are still being made, once a year, on the river. Swan upping takes place in the third week of July, when the King’s swan uppers and those of the Vintners and the Dyers row up the Thames in skiffs over five days, in recent centuries from Sunbury to Abingdon, catching the cygnets, weighing them, checking them for injury and assigning each to an owner by its parentage. The birds are ringed now. They used to be marked with a metal implement on the bill: one nick for the Dyers, one on each side for the Vintners.

That is where the strangest swan name comes from. The Swan with Two Necks is a corruption of the Swan with Two Nicks — a Vintners’ bird. The explanation is widely accepted, and the printed evidence for it is a great deal younger than the pun: the word historian Pascal Tréguer traces it in print to the 1930s and 1940s, including a letter to The Observer of 6 August 1939 from James H. Todd, then Swan Warden of the Vintners’ Company, who wrote that two nicks indicate an association with the trade. The reading is sound and the paper trail behind it is twentieth-century, which is worth knowing before repeating it as something medieval writers said.

The London house of that name earned its place in the history of travel rather than of birds. It stood in Lad Lane in the City, and it was one of the principal departure points for the north of England: carriers from Manchester and Lancashire were lodging there by 1637. Around 1835 the coach proprietor William Chaplin bought it and ran an operation of 68 coaches, 1,800 horses and some 2,000 staff out of the yard. It closed about 1860 and was replaced by a railway goods depot, completed in 1862 to a design by William Tite, for Chaplin’s own firm of railway carriers and later for Pickfords. The sequence is the whole story of what a coaching inn was in one address, and of why the Railway became a pub name as the coaching inns emptied.

The Lancastrian swan

The heraldic swan is a white bird gorged with a crown-shaped collar and held by a gold chain, and it was the badge of the de Bohun earls of Hereford and Essex. Medieval French romance attached the legend of the Swan Knight to the ancestry of Godfrey of Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade who died in 1100, and families who claimed descent from that line took the swan for themselves.

It then married into the crown. The senior male de Bohun line ended in 1373, and in 1380 Mary de Bohun married Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV in 1399; the house of Lancaster used the swan for more than a century afterwards, and it became associated with the Prince of Wales. One object shows what that meant on the ground. The Dunstable Swan Jewel — gold, with the bird in white enamel, a coronet collar and a chain — was made in about 1400, dug up in 1965 on the site of the Dominican friary at Dunstable, and is now in the British Museum. It is the only livery badge of its kind known to survive anywhere, and it was almost certainly meant to be given to a supporter to wear. Badges like it were still being handed out in the Wars of the Roses: Margaret of Anjou distributed swans in Cheshire in 1459.

Other families carried the swan by descent, among them the Staffords, the Courtenays and the Luttrells of Dunster. That last connection can be drunk in. The Luttrell Arms at Dunster is a late fifteenth-century house facing the yarn market, listed grade II*, standing on the site of three houses two of which were conveyed to Richard Luttrell in 1443 — the hotel’s own date, and the only part of the story with a document behind it. A family that used a swan badge and gave its name to an inn is the two habits this page is about, meeting in one village; the second of them is the subject of why pub names end in Arms.

Three Swans, and what each one’s record says

Ye Olde Swan at Thames Ditton sits on the Thames bank opposite Hampton Court and is advertised as a thirteenth-century riverside pub. Historic England describes something four hundred years younger: two early eighteenth-century houses in colourwashed brick, joined by a nineteenth-century link and extended again to make one public house. Nothing in the listing reaches beyond about 1700, and no medieval record of drinking on that bank has been traced.

The Black Swan in York keeps a date of 1417 on its history page, attached to William Bowes, a wool merchant and sheriff of the city. Historic England lists the timber-framed house grade II* and dates it late sixteenth century, with early and late seventeenth-century extensions; York Civic Trust puts the rebuilding at 1560 under Sir Martin Bowes and the brick additions at 1670, reads 1417 as the year of a mayoralty rather than a building, and says the house has been a public house since the late eighteenth century. The interior is one of the best in England — CAMRA rates it three stars, of outstanding national importance — and the year on the page dates neither the walls nor the trade.

The Old Swan Inn at Llantwit Major is the one to look at if you want to see what a high listing grade is for. Cadw lists it grade II*, designated in December 1952, as an unusually complete Welsh townhouse of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century: squared limestone rubble, a three-light mullioned window under a dripstone, chamfered beams, cobbled setts in front of the door and a stair built into the thickness of the wall. A twelfth-century date circulates locally. The register dates the fabric four hundred years later, and no record of drinking here has been traced at all, which is why we grade the claim rather than repeat it — the scale is set out in our methodology.

Where the Swans are

The pub-name atlas positions 304 of them from OpenStreetMap on 20 September 2026, five fewer than the census a fortnight earlier, which is the ordinary drift of a live map. Measured from that file, 22.4% stand north of 53.5°N — the line that passes a little above Manchester and below Leeds — against 16.6% of all 3,878 dots in the atlas, so this is one of the more northern of the common names. They also sit close together: the typical Swan has another Swan 7.5 km away, tighter than every name we mapped except the Red Lion at 7.0 km. Five are in Ireland.

Our figure is lower than the published ones because of what the matcher takes. It counts Swan, White Swan and Black Swan exactly, and drops a Swan Inn, a Swan Hotel, an Old Swan and a Swan with Two Necks. CAMRA’s 2007 list put the Swan fourth at 451; Pubs Galore counted 296 in 2019 and put it fifth. Three methods, three numbers, one bird.

What a Swan is worth as evidence

On its own, nothing — the name was available in the fourteenth century and was still being given in the nineteenth. What it does is point at two archives rather than one. If the house is near water, ask who owned the swans on it, because that right was granted in writing and the grants were worth keeping. If it is near a great estate, ask whose badge the swan is, because a chained swan is a specific claim and not a general bird. Either question is more likely to produce a document than staring at the sign, which is the argument of how historians date an old pub, and the rest of the visual vocabulary is in pub signs and what they mean. For the beast that beats it on numbers, see why there are so many Red Lions.

Sources

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