Eustace Busket, known as Eustace the Monk, was the most feared pirate of the English Channel in the early thirteenth century. Born to a noble family near Boulogne around 1170, he entered a monastery as a young man but abandoned it for a career as an outlaw, mercenary and sea-captain, at one point commanding a fleet of some thirty ships and seizing the Channel Islands as a base from which to dominate the Strait of Dover.
The story
He sold his services to whoever paid — first to King John of England, then to the French — and the romance written about him after his death gave him a sinister glamour, claiming he had travelled to Toledo to study black magic in a cave, learning to make ships invisible and to raise storms. None of the sorcery is found in sober sources, but it shows how completely legend had claimed him. His career ended at the naval Battle of Sandwich in 1217, when his fleet was defeated; captured aboard his flagship, he was beheaded on the deck and his head paraded on a lance through the towns of the Cinque Ports.