From 1371 or earlier, murderers and rapists met their end on this medieval stone bridge. The location was deliberate: beside the castle of the Counts of Flanders, where justice was administered, and over the moat that separated noble power from common streets. The condemned would be led across, forced to their knees, and beheaded before whatever crowd had gathered to witness the law's final word. The last recorded execution took place in 1585, more than two centuries after the practice began. By then, the bridge had accumulated its share of ghosts and legends, but one story above all others attached itself to the stones.

In 1371, according to the legend, a father and son faced execution for rebelling against Louis II, Count of Flanders. The count, seized by a morbid curiosity, decided to conduct an experiment. He wanted to know whether parents love their children more than children love their parents. The condemned pair were told that whichever one executed the other would have his own life spared. The father, reasoning that his son was younger and had more years to live, urged the son to take the sword. The son agreed. He stood on the bridge, raised the blade over his kneeling father, and prepared to strike. At the moment the sword touched his father's neck, the blade shattered. The count, apparently satisfied or perhaps unsettled by what he had witnessed, pardoned both men.

Until 1799, two statues on the bridge commemorated that moment: the son standing behind his kneeling father, sword raised. A contemporary engraving preserves the scene, showing the bound father and the hesitating executioner-son frozen in stone. An inscription accompanied the figures in archaic French: 'Ae Gandte le en Fant fraepe sae pere se Tacte desuu / Maies se Heppe rompe, si Grace de Dieu. MCCCLXXI.' The statues were removed at the end of the 18th century and appear not to have survived. When Durer saw them in 1521, he recorded the legend in his travel diary but apparently understood it backwards, believing the statues celebrated rather than lamented a son's violence against his father.

The bridge remains one of Ghent's most visited sites, drawing tourists to its medieval stones and dark history. It crosses the Leie where the river forms part of the moat surrounding the Gravensteen, the Castle of the Counts, creating a compact zone of medieval atmosphere. The executions ended nearly five centuries ago, and the statues vanished over two centuries past, but the story persists. Whether the legend of the shattered sword is history or invention, it captures something true about the human drama that unfolded on these stones: the intersection of power, punishment, and the complicated bonds between parents and children that even a count's cruelty could not sever.