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Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the son of Edmund Crouchback, was "the old hog" and the "stage-player;" pale, dark, Provencal Aymar de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, he called "Joseph the Jew;" the fierce Guy, Earl of Warwick, "the black dog of Ardennes."

Alice, her daughter, was married to the young Earl of Warenne; Guy, the eldest son, received some valuable presents and returned to France; William de Valence, with the order of knighthood, obtained an annuity and the honor of Hertford; and Aymar was sent to Oxford, preferred to several benefices, and at last made bishop of Winchester.

It might very well have become, in Europe, as in Asia and Africa, a kind of ordeal, or method of searching for and trying malefactors. Men like Jacques Aymar might have played, on a larger scale, the part of Hopkins, the witch-finder. Aymar was, indeed, employed by some young men to point out, by help of the wand, the houses of ladies who had been more frail than faithful.

'Guided by the wand or by some internal sensation, Aymar now pursued the track of the assassins, entered the court of the Archbishop's palace, left the town by the bridge over the Rhone, and followed the right bank of the river.

At his arrival before Dieppe, he found as governor there Aymar de Chastes, a man of wits and honor, a very moderate Catholic, and very strongly in favor of the party of policists. Under Henry III. he had expressly refused to enter the League, saying to Villars, who pressed him to do so, "I am a Frenchman, and you yourself will find out that the Spaniard is the real head of the League."

Among the ancient Frisians it was regularly used for the detection of criminals; and the reputation of Jacques Aymar was won by his discovery of the perpetrator of a horrible murder at Lyons.

He soon wearied of the antechambers of the Louvre. It was here, however, that his destiny awaited him, and the work of his life was unfolded. Aymar de Chastes, Commander of the Order of St. John and Governor of Dieppe, a gray-haired veteran of the civil wars, wished to mark his closing days with some notable achievement for France and the Church. To no man was the King more deeply indebted.

This logic of Malebranche's is not agreeable to believers in the twig; but there the controversy stood, till, in 1692, Jacques Aymar, a peasant of Dauphine, by the use of the twig discovered one of the Lyons murderers. Though the story of this singular event is pretty well known, it must here be briefly repeated.

Bruce was gathering men so fast, that he ventured to give battle to Aymar de Valence at London Hill, and defeated him chiefly by using the long spears of the Scottish infantry against the horse of the English. Aymar went to explain the state of affairs to King Edward at Carlisle.

This earlier Isabel, daughter of Aymar, Count of Angoulême, upon the day of her betrothal to Hugues de Lusignan, was carried off by John of England, who put away his wife, Avice, to marry this beautiful, wicked enchantress. After the death of John, Isabel came back to France to marry her old lover.