m according to the custom of the age.

The political importance of the battle was very great, for it gave the
death-blow to the cause of the barons who supported Louis, and it fixed
Henry III. on the throne. But the defeat and death of the Monk was widely
regarded as in a peculiar sense a victory over the powers of evil. The man
became within a few years after his death the hero of many legends of
piracy and necromancy. It was said that after leaving the cloister he
studied the black art in Toledo, which had a great reputation in the
middle ages as a school of witchcraft. A French poem written seemingly
within a generation after his death represents him as a wizard. In a prose
narrative discovered and printed by M. Francisque Michel, it is said that
he made his ship invisible by magic spells. A brother wizard in the
English fleet, by name Stephen Crabbe, detected him while he was invisible
to others. The bold and patriotic Crabbe contrived to board the bewitched
flagship, and was seen apparently laying about him with an axe on the
water--which the spectators took to be a proof either that he was mad, or
that this was the devil in his shape. At last he struck off the head of
Eustace, upon which the spell was broken, and the ship appeared. Crabbe
was torn to pieces--presumably by the familiar spirits of the Monk--and
the fragments were scattered over the water. Saint Bartholomew, whose
feast is on the 21st of August, came to encourage the English by his
presence and his voice.

[Illustration: Dover]

Ascertainable fact concerning Eustace is less picturesque, but enough is
known to show that he was an adventurous and unscrupulous scoundrel. In
his youth he was a monk, and left the cloister to claim an inheritance
from the count of Boulogne. Not having received satisfaction he became a
freebooter on land and sea, and mercenary soldier. He is frequently
mentioned in the Pipe, Patent and Close Rolls. For a time he served King
John, but when the king made friends with the count of Boulogne, he fled
abroad, and entered the service of the French prince Louis and his
father Philip Augustus. Chroniclers lavish on him the titles of
"archipirata," "vir flagitiosissimus et nequissimus," and poets made him
an associate of the devil.

The evidence concerning Eustace is collected by Herren Wendelin
Forster and Johann Trost, in their edition of the French poem
"Wistasse le moine" (Halle, 1891). See for the battle Sir N. Harris