After that the victory was easy. Now such a well-thought-out plan of fighting shows that naval warfare had in England already reached the scientific stage. If the reader will take his chart of the Straits of Dover and work out the manœuvres which I have given in greater detail elsewhere,[22] he will see that the English admiral displayed a perfect knowledge of the Channel tides, seamanship, and naval tactics in thus outwitting a force twice his own strength. And again, at the battle of Sluys, the victory was won by the superior tactics of the English, which showed excellent seamanship, perfect knowledge of the Flemish tides, and sound judgment in the problems of the sea. The English in 1340 played the same game as they had in 1217. They confused the enemy, who wondered why the English fleet were apparently going away from them. They wondered still more when, after standing out to sea, the English went about and came down on them like a pack of sea-monsters eager to devour them and successful in the attempt. So also exactly ten years later, in that very interesting battle of Les Espagnols sur Mer, which is unknown to many a modern layman, when Edward II commanded in person, we find everything being done by system and plan. He comes down with his Court to lodge near the sea. He himself goes afloat, spends a long time in training manœuvres, keeps a look-out man at the masthead who suddenly spies the enemy coming down Channel, when, to quote the words of Froissart, he ordered the trumpets to be sounded and the ships “to form a line of battle.” The rest is merely a narrative of collisions between ship and ship, with masts and sails falling, chains and grapnels straining, the hurling of stones and iron bars from the castle at the masthead, the felling of one another’s masts, the cutting adrift of the enemy’s halyards and shrouds, the heaving overboard (a favourite and regular habit in war) of every man and boy of the enemy they could lay their hands on, and finally victory to the English.