Christophe Butkens

Christophe Butkens (1590–1650) was a Cistercian abbot from Antwerp, a historian and a genealogist who developed a new hatching system.

Butkens developed his own hatching system but he himself used it in an inconsistent way, leading to misunderstandings.

His hatching method was published in the book Annales genealogiques de la maison de Lynden (Antwerp, 1626), which has been seen as flagrant in falsifying the van Lynden genealogy, as shown by Baron van Linden in 1891.

According to Philipp Spener some maintained that Butkens was the first to invent a heraldic hatching system, but others gave that honour to Marcus Vulson de la Colombière.

[1] Butkens was one of the two censors (the other being Henricus Calenus) who approved publication of Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz's treatise Declaración Mystica de las Armas de España (Brussels, Lucas van Meerbeeck, 1636), which contains an alternative hatching system.