Beau-Séant
The definition is "Battle cry of the Templars, the motto they bore on their banner". However with all my Googling I fail to find what it means...

Could Seant have been a person or a place?

According to Sir Walter Scott, it meant "Be noble."

>with all my Googling.. ??

The Templar were divided into three classes. The first class, the knights, consisted of the nobles that joined the order. These comprised the principle fighting arm of the Knights Templar. Knights wore a white surcoat marked with a red cross on the breast. The next class was the sergeants. These were composed of the lower class freemen that joined the order. They provided menial labor, and care, while at the same time serving as infantry on the battlefield. Sergeants wore the red cross on a brown mantle. Third were the clerics. These were priests who could come from any class. The clerics wore green, with the red cross, and gloves. So that their hands would be clean when serving mass, they wore these gloves at all times. As a symbol of chastity, all Templar wore a sheepskin girdle at all times. The banner of the knights was verticle, divided into two squares, one of black and the other of white. The black square symbolized the world of sin left behind when joining the order, while the white one symbolized the pure life that they knights now led. The banner was known as the "Beau Seant," which in French means "Be noble!" or "Be glorious!"

from http://asms.k12.ar.us/armem/daymart/masons.htm

As for non-English words and expressions, when google doesn't yield any results, you could try an on-line bilingual dictionary.

For French,

http://www.wordreference.com/fr/index.htm

is as good as any.

and

http://www.wordreference.com

has Spanish and Italian and

http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/

German.

These are the best of several free on-line bilingual dictionaries, in my opinion.

Is it just me, or do others tend to be skeptical when something like this turns up on the internet with words misspelled? I saw principle instead of principal and verticle instead of vertical and immediately my mind said, "oops./ I wonder what else is wrong."

Am I being snobbish about spelling?

Not trying to be funny here, not trying to be anything other than curious about others' reactions to what I consider egregious errors.

snobbish about spelling

It's unclear to me whether the offending passage is original to Glick or whether Glick is merely quoting George Washington. If the latter I would cut him a little slack in the spelling department; they weren't as nit-picky in those days. Even if the former I would be hard pressed to discount such a long passage on the basis of two misspellings/typos which could easily have been introduced anywhere in a long line of writing/proofreading/copy-editing.

For me, it depends on where I find the text, TEd.

If I'm reading a textbook and keep finding errors in spelling then, I tend to drop it as a source or reference. If they didn't check themselves, how can I be sure they checked their facts.

In a personal web page, I assume it was an error when they copied the information...BUT, if it is a personal web page, I won't assume what they're saying is absolutely accurate either. Which means, I won't fight to the death on a point since I don't have an official source of info. (which is why that invented word in the dictionary just pisses me off because they're supposed to be accurate. [still ranting-e] )

Tell me about it. I spent two hours driving around northern OH roads trying to find Goblu so I could have lunch there.

I did try Beau-Seant on the translation site and got Beautiful Seant. Oh well.

This is a total stab, but is there a relation to seance, which means a sitting. Couldit be that beau-seant has something to do with sitting pretty, on top of the world, so to speak, which might imply some sort of nobility?

well, here's an interesting thing. when you google "beau seant" (with a space) you get a handful of sites which claim the meaning is "be noble" or "be glorious".

but Google, as is its wont, asks: Did you mean: "beauseant"?

if you take that link you get a whole bunch more links which specify that "beauseant" is the *name* of the Templar banner

The Beauseant

from the archives of The Most Revd. Gary Beaver KGCTJ

"Our Order adopted a striped white and black banner, called the Beauseant, after the original piebald horse; and this word also became the battle-cry."

..I don't know, maybe we don't want to delve too much further into this eldritch Templar... <arrggghhhh.....>

...I don't know, maybe we don't want to delve too much further into this eldritch Templar...

This subject was never worth delving into in the first place, tsuwm.

Better late to this insight, than never, I suppose.

"moss" is a sock puppet (pseudonym) for an individual who has been banned by management from this site. Apparently, he has taken the trouble to find another computer from which to post. He uses other pseudonyms as well, including "plutarch" "carpathian" and several more. Apparently, he has seen fit to find another computer from which to post. It is generally believed that it is his intention to destroy this board.

a relation to seance,

AHD traces séance back to the Old French seoir, to sit. The modern French is s'asseoir, which might be part of the reason we're having such trouble googling or translating séant. If it's Old French I would say that the -ant ending makes it look like a third person plural verb and the translation might could be something like "they sit pretty."

There are many spellings of beaucéant (beauséant, bauceans, and beauçant). There are almost as many etymologies. One page I found offered the one mentioned here as coming from a Provençal word meaning 'piebald': bausan. The word bausan is traced by Meyer-Lübke to the Latin word balteus 'girdle; swordbelt' and whence the English belt.

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/rord.html#templar

You could try contacting these guys who're writing an online encyclopaedia of the Templars:

http://www.templiers.org/

I want to know more about the original piebald horse. The original when? who's horse? why did the Templars care about a horse? etc?

FWIW, Zed:
"The Templars' emblem was a horse carrying two knights, a symbol of poverty and brotherhood. Bernard clearly viewed his rough-hewed band more favorably than he did rich secular knights, noting that Templars were seen 'rarely washed, their beards bushy, sweaty and dusty, stained by their harness and the heat'. The Knights Templars wore white mantels emblazoned with a red cross and rode to battle behind a white and black banner called the Beauseant, after the piebald horsed favored by the order's founders. The same word became their battle cry." - Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects
http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/templars/tempic09.htm
FTR: yes, I saw that "mantels"...and horsed.