True Spies Debriefs: Dr. Jenny Benham on Medieval Spycraft
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Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to True Spies Debrief. In the early days of espionage, the work of intelligence gathering often fell to seemingly unlikely spies. During the medieval era, women, slaves, exiles, and even children were tasked with collecting and sharing secrets.

Professor Jenny Benham, who teaches medieval diplomacy and international law at Cardiff University, has shifted her focus in recent years to the untold history of medieval espionage. Jenny sat down with True Spies producer Morgan Childs to talk about Europe's long history of spying and her new work on the little birds carrying powerful secrets.

Jenny, it's a pleasure to have you here and I'm excited to talk to you about something that's really different from what we've covered on The Debrief in the past. And I think I'd like to start by asking you about you. Tell me a little bit about your work and how you came to be interested in espionage of all things. So I'm really a historian of medieval diplomacy and sort of international history of international law.

And it was really while I was researching my last book on international law, I was reading quite a lot of treaties and using them as the kind of sources for international law. And I noticed that there were a lot of spies in these treaties. So a lot of the treaties were sort of making provisions for ensuring that espionage either didn't happen or that rulers were kind of agreeing that they would share information with each other. So a kind of intelligence network at quite a high level.

So I was quite intrigued by that. But it wasn't really until John Le Carre died that I thought to myself, oh, do you know what? I used to like his books. And I thought, I'll just do a medieval version of some of these and look at some of these things. And at the time, I kind of thought, if I remember rightly, he died just before Christmas. I kind of wrote a very short blog post on it, just from some material that I had available very swiftly. I took an afternoon to just kind of look through it.

it. And from there, I thought to myself, oh, wouldn't it be fun to just do this little project? You know, just a few kind of examples and a little bit of evidence. I didn't think that I would find very much espionage. I mean, you know, it's meant to be secret, right?

And then unfortunately from there, it's kind of rolled onto this massive project that I am currently working on. And it's got loads of kind of different facets to it. So things to do with ecclesiastical espionage, espionage involving women, espionage to do with assassins and, you know, people who have been planted into rulers' households and things like that. And these kind of, you know, the little birds, obviously.

So all sorts of things. This was not what I anticipated at the beginning at all. You

You say the project, you're referring to a forthcoming book, we should say. Yes, yes, yeah. So there is a book in process, I should say, and it's called Little Birds, Spice and Espionage in Medieval Europe. And I'm just finalizing it at the moment. And it's kind of working on this basis of the little birds, which are kind of mentioned in lots of different texts from the medieval period. So say 700 to 1250, something like that.

It's basically a kind of metaphor for messengers, spies, people who are gathering intelligence in lots of different ways.

And it was one of the first things that I noticed about the material when I started reading it, this kind of prevalence of the little birds. I mean, it's super interesting, right? You know, this kind of idea that, you know, winged messengers in all sorts of ways, whether we're thinking of it as kind of angels or as birds flying around. I just loved it. And of course, birds is something that is close to me anyway. My husband happened to be a falconer, so I thought that this was super interesting at lots of

lots of different levels. It is. So say more about this connection, this metaphor, because it's gone back a long time. It's been used in a lot of different ways. And we've been saying little birds, but...

My understanding from reading your work is that these birds are not always little, right? No, no. So it's quite interesting. I mean, in the modern period, we think of it as, you know, the saying, a little bird told me, right? So this kind of implication that either the message is secret or that the messenger themselves is kind of doing something secretly. Right.

and it's a phrase that doesn't exist in the Middle Ages. So I will say that first of all. But there are lots of kind of variations of that phrase that does exist. For example, in the Bible, we get it in the works of Shakespeare. I think the letters of Jonathan Swift, for example, there is a letter to his wife, Stella, in 1711 that mentions this particular phrase also. So we know that this phrase kind of exists, even if not exactly.

as we know it now, but in some kind of form. And then from there, I started noticing that little birds are used, or birds generally, are used in lots of ways. So Alcuin, for example, he's a Northumbrian teacher at the court of the most powerful king in the 8th century, which is Charles the Great of Francia. And he's working as a teacher and priest at Charles's court.

And he writes lots and lots of letters to people across the whole of Europe. And one of the things that he very frequently does is that he refers to people who are carrying messengers as sparrows. He talks about them as one of them is a cockerel, for example. So you're crowing, so you're using your voice to kind of divulge what the message says.

He talks about the eagle. So this is one of his great friends, Arno, he's the bishop of Salzburg, who's the eagle and kind of goes over the Alps to Rome. And he talks about the eagle kind of carrying information back to Alcuin in lots of ways. So he uses birds in lots of ways. But there are lots of other kind of literature or other texts that do this too.

So we get in literary texts, for example, poems such as Rudlib, which is an 11th century Latin poem, talks about the little birds.

So parrots, jackdaws that are sort of carrying messages. And in particular, the jackdaw is one in this particular poem that is really prominent as a spy. The jackdaw is used, for example, by Rudlib's mother to tell that Rudlib is coming back home to her. So she's carrying the news of his return to his mother, basically.

But there are other birds that are not so small, as you say. They are not little. Are we seeing these metaphors because they're referring to a profession that doesn't yet exist? Yeah, well, there is some of that. But I think the main of it is that...

If you're using a metaphor, no one can accuse you of actually saying or divulging anything properly as such. It's a way of kind of disguising what you're really saying, isn't it? When you're writing poetry or when you're writing literature or if you're using metaphors, for example...

You can say things that you wouldn't otherwise say. And that's the great thing about it. So, you know, talking about, you know, sparrows flitting around in the court, for example, and they are gathering intelligence that they are then kind of divulging to various other people. Then, you know, you're not necessarily saying who these people are.

And you're not divulging exactly who they are carrying this information to. You're just kind of making a very general reference. So there might be suspicions that there are espionage, but no one really knows. I suppose then I have to wonder, is the metaphor also somewhat minimizing, right? Because as we will talk about, a lot of these early books

spies, as we would call them now. They were not educated men of means. They were people who were on the fringes of society and women and sometimes children. Some of these birds are definitely metaphors to the kind of individuals that are perhaps on the margins of society. As you say, women, children, people who might be non-conformist religious in some way or another.

But there are also birds that very much are these kind of, you know, men and women who perhaps are more educated and who are part of recognized society. And those are the types of people, I mean, they shouldn't be engaging in espionage because espionage is a kind of, you know, this is a treacherous, treacherous thing to do in many ways.

And so talking about it in this kind of metaphorical way is a pretty good way of kind of saying, well, we know that this goes on.

But we can't say it openly, in a sense, because that is not acceptable. Because if you are of a higher status, you should do diplomacy. That's the right way to go about it. That's the kind of the recognized way of kind of communicating with foreign powers. Whereas espionage is not the kind of it's meant to be the secret way. And secrecy is things that people of high status do not do.

engaging or shouldn't engage in.

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That's Airwave History Plus, available now on Apple Podcasts. Airwave History Plus, the essential audio destination for history lovers. So I'm curious to talk more about these sort of unlikely spies. And maybe let's start with women. I was sort of surprised to see in your work how prominently women feature, not in a sort of, how to say, formalized role, but in early days of what we now call espionage work.

Yeah, so women have lots of different roles within espionage or within intelligence gathering. So we have the women that are outright spies. So these are the women who are both gathering and carrying kind of that information to the king, for example, or to someone who is what we might think of as her handler. I don't know. I mean, it's a horribly modern word, but I'll use it so we all know what we're talking about. Mm-hmm.

So one example of that is a woman called Alice of Sainte. She exists in the reign of King John, so very early 13th century.

She appears in the court records of King John's household, where she is very clearly being paid for her espionage services. She is very specifically denoted as a spy, whatever we think that that might have meant. But it doesn't say what she was actually doing, of course, because, you know, it's meant to be secret. But what is quite clear is that she is paid

quite a lot of money, much more money than most messengers or most envoys would be paid. And so from that, we can kind of gather that probably she's being paid danger money, right? This is her expenses. There is a recognition that carrying out those kind of missions

are not the norm. This is something extraordinary. We know that if we compare also to males that are doing exactly the same types of missions, they are also paid quite a lot more money than normal messengers.

We don't really know very much about Alice. Likely, she was a secular member of the Abbe-Odame, which is a kind of nunnery in the city of Sainte. And we know that Sainte also, in the early 13th century, is in a part of Poitou in southwestern France.

which is highly contested. It was one of the parts of the English king's continental lands that he actually retained after he lost Normandy in 1204. But this particular part of southwestern France is one of the regions that he managed to hold on to, at least for a while.

but it's highly contested with the French king. So Alice is basically living, or whatever we might think that she was doing at this nunnery, she is basically based in this region which is highly contested.

So we can imagine from a strategic point of view, she is extremely well-placed to carry news about what is happening, about loyalty of various lords, about the movements of troops, perhaps, whatever is happening and so on and so forth. But we don't know, of course, if that's what she was doing. We have two explicit mentions of her doing missions. One dates from 1209 and one dates from 1212.

And we think that probably the one from 1212, this was a year when King John wanted to launch another campaign on the continent in order to recover some of the lands that he had lost. And for that, information about what was going on in the southwestern region would, of course, have been really valuable to him. He ended up having to suspend his military campaign because it basically was rumors of a rebellion in England.

And so as a consequence, he cancelled this and it ends up being delayed for about two years. And it is just after it has been cancelled that Alistair turns up in England, relaying some sort of information to him that we don't exactly know what it was. If I was to speculate, I would probably say there is something to do with the loyalty of the lords, for example, or expectations about what they might have been expecting from this military campaign. But we don't know for sure.

In 1209, by contrast, I don't think that it's anything to do with the recovery of King John's lands or anything like that. But King John had another problem, and that is his dispute with the Pope. And we know that in 12... That is a problem. It's a big problem for him because, of course, England is under interdict, which means that no church services can be celebrated, so no mass, you know, those kinds of things.

And we know that John himself is communicated at some point during this year. And of course, that is a real problem, because if you do that, then you're, you know, in theory, you're kind of releasing all of his subjects of their own sort of loyalty. So this is a real problem for him. And it is very shortly after this that

Well, sorry, Alice is actually in England during this period. And then very shortly after this, she then returns to the continent. And it's possible that she was accompanied by a number of other sort of ecclesiastics who leaves England around this same time.

and probably because they want to kind of keep their ecclesiastical office. And there'll be some awkward questions asked by the Pope, I'm sure, if Alice was found to remain in England with King John. So she goes back. And that's all we know. Again, you know, the records are really sparse. We know nothing else about Alice.

My suspicion is, although we don't have the evidence, that she was probably employed by him, by King John, throughout that three-year period, maybe before and maybe after. But because we don't have the records surviving, so the evidence of Alice comes from what is known as the household court rolls of King John, the so-called Misae Rolls.

And because we don't have all of them surviving from Jon's reign, we don't know what was happening in between these years. And we don't know what's happening before 1209. And we don't really know what was happening after 1213 either. So it's a problem in terms of finding out what's happening with Alice. We just know that she is a female and she's from Sandh.

and that she was at the nunnery, so likely the Abuea or Dam, and that at these two specific points, she turns up in England giving King John information. Do you have reason to suspect that in the 13th century there were other women like her? Or how sort of rare was she in this field in the early medieval period? Yeah, so it's a really tricky question to answer, primarily because what we get is, of course, sort of statistics

snippets of information. King John's reign is a really good reign to kind of take as a snapshot of things, because it's the first reign when we get lots of financial records, court records, those kinds of things, where we can start to look for these people in earnest. You know, in the later medieval period, you know, women frequently turn up as spies.

So I know I do have colleagues in Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, who are working on female spies during the Hundred Years' War in the 14th or 15th century, for example, where women are carrying messages and no one is batting an eyelid at this. This is nothing unusual at all. And so the question is always, well, what was happening before? And England has the best records, but even here, the records are just not good enough for us to really trace them very well. In the earlier period, so the period, say, before 1200,

We get snippets from things like chronicles, from letters, from literary evidence that women carried messengers. So, for example, there is a poem from the 9th century written by Theodore of Orleans called The Battle of the Birds.

And in there, there is a line that talks about this woman who is carrying information from the kingdom of Francia to Rome, basically to the Pope. And it talks about this woman carrying this information to Rome, where she gave it to a priest who then gave it to someone that was higher up. Likely, she probably was a pilgrim because the poem says that she came to Rome to pray.

So that's one example where we are kind of, you know, seeing that there is a woman who's kind of passing on very important information. But there are lots of other snippets like that. And the trick is really to try to piece together all these little snippets of information from lots of different sources. And this is effectively what I'm sort of trying to do at the moment. And yeah, there are lots of information of it and lots of snippets of it, but we don't always get information

kind of coherence. So I wouldn't be able to say, oh, you know, there are 50 women during the reign of, I don't know, say Charlemagne, for example, who are acting as spies for the Frankish king. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to do it because the evidence is just not good enough. Sure. But can I ask you to say more about the later period, how it comes to be that there are so many women that you say as nobody bats an eye to the fact that...

that there are so many women spies in the 14th and 15th centuries, is that right? Yeah, so once we get, and again, so I should say that much of this information has never been, you know, historians have not necessarily looked at this consistently.

So some of the things that I'm saying now are things that people need to do more research on, basically. But I do know from the work that has been done by my colleague Jelle Heimes and Lisa Demmets, they have investigated some of the financial records of some of the Belgian cities during the Hundred Years' War.

where it can be shown that women were very frequently carrying messengers between different cities in this particular part of Europe, for example. And we also know from court records in places like Italy, for example, which have very good records from the sort of late 13th century onwards,

Where we can see the women are very frequently fined, for example, or they are punished in some way or another for having been spies, for carrying information, for betraying the various cities that they might be from, for example. So we know that there is a mass of information relating to it.

But what hasn't been done, because there is a lot of records to go through, so what hasn't been done is a kind of wholesale kind of looking at all of the records. I mean, it would be a massive project. But it'd be interesting, for example, for someone to do it just for England to see what else we could come up with for that period. And maybe after I've done this project, maybe that's my next one. Who knows?

Let's talk about another group because you have written that it can be difficult in the historical record to sort out spies from slaves and captives and exiles among other groups. Talk a little bit about that. So exiles are a very good group of people to think about when it comes to espionage because exiles are, of course, expelled from the territory where they've been living because they have committed some sort of crime.

Very often it's kind of disloyalty to the Lord. And now they are expelled from that territory and they need money, right? They need resources. They need to have something to do and they need to kind of be able to keep themselves alive. So very frequently they end up going to other kingdoms or other rulers' territories and kind of providing some sort of service. And one of the quickest way of doing that is, of course, to say, I have information.

Here it is, right? Very often these people are high status people.

They are people who are perhaps threatening to a ruler's own, you know, his governance, for example. They might be claimant to the thrones in a lot of cases. And so one way of finding a way of kind of sustaining their life once they've been expelled is to go and say to another ruler, I have information that you want or that I can be a military commander for you because I have knowledge of this

landing places, for example, on the coast or whatever it might be. But then what is really interesting is that most exiles, of course, make their way back to the kingdom or the territory where they've come from.

And now what do they do? Some of them have been there away for, say, five, ten, in some cases, even 20 years. And very frequently when they come back, they say, I tell you what, I know quite a lot about this territory where I've been living. And I could tell you about all of his troops and how he trains them and where he keeps his ships and everything else. Right. So exiles are really exiles.

excellent in terms of espionage and providing this kind of vital information. There are also people who, of course, if you live in a country for five, 10 or 20 years, you know, a bit like myself, you learn the language, you kind of integrate, you learn the culture. And that can also very frequently be useful in terms of espionage.

So if you're speaking another language, for example, that might mean that you could be sent out for future missions, for example. You can find out other things. You might also be able to talk to your ruler about specific customs, about when people are celebrating certain things so that there will be no defense of a city, for example, at certain times of the years because they might be celebrating a particular feast day in a certain part of a kingdom.

and so on and so forth so those really cultural kind of informations and they are also extremely valuable and exiles are really uh really brilliant informers in lots of ways and much of the evidence that we got is about exiles who are or have been spies in some way or another and

And this means that very frequently in our evidence, these people are not sort of, I mean, you know, no one calls a spy a spy. That'd be giving the game away, right? But they are kind of referred to as, you know, they've been exiles or they've been pilgrims or, you know, they've been slaves or captives away in a faraway country. But really what they are doing is sort of providing information and providing espionage services.

And what about slaves and people who are working in indentured servitude? It's a tricky one because we know, of course, that servants, if you're a household servant, for example, well, you have both the opportunity. You likely know the people of the household. You know who they are. So you know which people should be in that household also.

You are likely to have the opportunity. So if guests come, for example, then you can provide information on those guests or you might be providing information to those guests. So you have the opportunities in lots of ways.

And likely also, because you are a servant, people kind of ignore you, right? Because you're kind of on the margins of the household in some ways. And so we know from the evidence that this is where a lot of espionage takes place in the kind of the court or the household of the king and his kind of closest advisors, you know, the high status men and women. This is where most espionage takes place.

Some of those people are servants who are free, and in the earlier period, some of them are also unfree, so what we might think of as slaves. And that kind of gives a very sinister tone to some of this, I think, partly because regardless of whether we think of these people as kind of free or unfree, the thing that connects nearly all of the evidence is captivity. Right.

Okay. So you might have been captured because you were a soldier, for example, or you were out on a campaign and, you know, you may have been a foot soldier, so you're not very high up. And then you end up being captured and then you end up being sold on as a slave and you end up in someone's household. And now the way to kind of get yourself ingratiated with your new captor or whatever you might think of them is to kind of provide information, a

And also, if you are a captured soldier, then it may well be that you already have certain skills that actually lends itself quite well for you to do those sort of services. So, for example, you might guide your captor into the territory where you had come from, for example, because you have knowledge of that territory.

And this is a way for them to kind of perhaps say to you, if you do this, we will free you. Right. So it's quite unpleasant in lots of ways. It can also be a way, of course, for in particular for those very low status in a household and, you know, children, perhaps those who don't necessarily have family around them. It can be a way for them to provide the necessities of lives. So food and water, etc.

So in the example of Rudlew, for example, that poem that I mentioned earlier, it's 11th century. It talks about the mother who's kind of rearing this jackdaw who eats at her table.

and you know she feeds the crumbs from the table for example and we know that the jackdaw is very clearly either a small boy or a small girl because this jackdaw is able to kind of climb up a tree and right to the top so we know that in a tree the higher the branches go the weaker the branches get or the smaller the branches are and so only someone of a

very light build, would be able to get up to the highest branches. So we know that this is likely to be a child. The fact that they're being fed crumbs is indicating that this is someone that is sustaining themselves by doing this work in order to have the bare necessities of life. In other circumstances, there are other servants who are slightly more higher status

that are clearly also doing this. I mean, it's a way of kind of making your way up on the ladder, on the social ladder. I want to say social climber, but you're never going to turn into a lord or less likely to, I guess, at least. But you can definitely make your way up.

If you're providing good service, loyal service, you're proving that you're faithful by bringing kind of very important information about, I don't know, threat to life, for example, of the noble lord of your household, then you are providing a great service and that's likely to be rewarded quite well, for example. So there are ways of kind of making their way up.

What you're describing here is a lot of informal service and exchange of time and information, but I wonder if you can tell me at what point this becomes a formalized practice.

profession? Yeah, it's a really tricky one to answer because by the time we get to King John's reign, when we have all of these kind of other court records and records in the rolls, it is quite clear that there are specific people who clearly are making a living of being messengers of all kinds. Espionage is then part of that. So not everything that they're doing is kind of secret

but they're certainly gathering information in all sorts of ways. And so by the 13th century, we can see that this is a kind of formalized part of government in lots of ways. But there are lots of times in the earlier period, we can see that there are formalized kind of aspects to it. But some of the people are, of course, also doing other duties.

So, for example, if we think about some of the household officials in the court, so people like the chancellor, so that is the person that is kind of keeping the king's writing office or the lord's writing office, or the chamberlain who's kind of looking after the more kind of military or secular aspects of the lord's household, or the doorkeeper, who's the person that kind of guards the entrance to the lord's kind of inner circle.

These are sort of three people who frequently turn up within espionage. You know, the chancellor and the chamberlain very frequently are the spymasters. They have huge networks of informants under them. They also are people who are able to forge letters, to also write messages in lots of ways and to send messages. They have the people and the personnel in order to do it.

But they also have other legitimate duties, of course. You know, when we talk about at what point does this become professional, it's quite difficult to answer because, you know, gathering information, is that always espionage? Well, you know, maybe, I don't know, MI5 and MI6, they have lots of people who are gathering information, I guess. And, you know, most of what they're doing, data analysis, is, you know, is espionage.

gathering information, not all of it necessarily espionage, I guess.

Maybe what about those that have kind of been planted into someone's household? So spies who are, or servants very frequently, who are planted into someone's household in order to gather information or to carry messengers in lots of ways back to their lord. And in particular, they tend to be kind of planted into households where there are suspicions that they might be, that the lord might be a rebel, for example.

So we know from 1220, for example, there is a really great letter. It's referred to as a spy report, one of the first espionage reports from medieval England. And it talks about this man who is clearly following the household of a suspected rebel in the reign of King Henry III of England.

And he has been planted there by Robert Lexington, who is a kind of middling official, we might think. And it is Robert Lexington who's writing this spy report back to a man called Hubert Burr, who is very high up in the King's household.

The king, by the way, at this point is a minor. So Robert of Lexington writes this spy report to Hubert of Burgh, who is very high up, one of the top officials in King Henry III's court. And in this spy report, he says that my man is currently tracking one of the people who are suspected of being a rebel.

He is following him from basically from Oxford all the way through kind of Nottinghamshire and into Yorkshire and towards the border with Scotland.

And Robert O. Lexington has received some sort of message from the man that he has planted into the rebels' household. And he is basically acting on that message. And he says, I'm going to go and secure all the castles on the border between England and Scotland to make sure that the rebel is not kind of, you know, able to do us any further harm. And then he says that, you know,

Fear not, my man is still with the rebels' household and he is slowing him down by basically making sure that his horses get ill so he can't kind of carry on. So slowing down this kind of rebel and his journey north as it is.

And he also says, don't worry, my man will continue to provide reports to me. And so I will keep you informed, basically. So it's a really, really great example of someone that has clearly been planted into the household. And I think it's probably the first clear evidence that we have of that, although there are lots of other examples of it. So I know, for example, the assassins,

Very often when we get evidence of assassins, they are people who have been planted into households of various individuals. So, for example, there is a really interesting charter from the early 12th century. It is of Count Hugh of Chapayne. There was an attempted assassination of Count Hugh by a household servant. Now, this household servant, he had actually been a soldier in a former life and he was captured.

So here we have that theme of captivity again. Count Hugh is doing such good service to Christendom by releasing this man, showing how merciful he is. This is, of course, a way of getting himself straight into heaven, in case you're wondering. So he's doing a very good service by basically buying up these captives and releasing them into their households. The servant was there for a few years,

And he was ingratiating himself with Count Hugh and doing him great service, was very loyal. And then suddenly he tries to slit his throat. Aha. Surprise. And fortunately, I don't know, fortunately for Count Hugh, he escaped. So Count Hugh manages to escape.

And basically, he goes to this particular monastery where they nurse him back to health. And the reason why we know about this incident is because afterwards, once he is healthy again, Cantu basically gives some land to this particular monastery. And that's how we know about this particular incident. Now, we don't really know very much more about this assassin, apart from the fact that he was called Alexander.

And that after the deed, he escaped, probably back to the Lord from where he had come. There is absolutely no question that this man had clearly been planted into the household, knowing that Hugh, who was a kind of renowned for releasing captives in this way, they knew that this would have been a good way of kind of doing it. I mean, it's a very clear example, but we don't know who kind of Alexanders

you know, who his handler or who his lord might have been. So we don't know who it was that was actually trying to harm Hugh. But I mean, it's unlikely that he was Alexander himself. Why would he do it? He had no motive as such. If Hugh was treating him well and he was kind of living in his household and so on and so forth. So he has no motive. You know, it's just got to be someone else, right? Yeah.

So it's a really good example. And there are quite a lot of examples like that. In the 11th century, for example, there is a baker in a monastery in southern Italy. And southern Italy at the time is this kind of melting pot of lots of different kind of religions and kind of groups of people. So there are Christians living there. There are Muslims living there. There are

those who are kind of Roman Catholic, and then there are those who are kind of Greek Orthodox. And this baker who is at this monastery, he is what they call a Saracen, by which I mean that he's a Muslim, clearly a convert to Christianity, having been put into this monastery.

And he has married, apparently, the niece of the prior of this particular monastery. But for whatever reason, he didn't like the abbot. And after having lived there for many years, he again, all of a sudden, decides he's going to get rid of the abbot. And he does so by putting poison in his food.

So there is something about that this is a kind of trope because, of course, he was of a different religion. So he's a Muslim and, you know, you shouldn't trust them. This is what all the sources of this period kind of make out. But clearly, it seems very likely that, again, this man had probably been captured. So again, here we have that kind of notion of the captivity again. Nearly all espionage instances come from that same basis.

And then he's kind of clearly making his way up into the household by doing great service, being the baker, for example, marrying the niece of the prior. You know, now you're kind of getting yourself higher up and then suddenly kind of seeing your chance for, you know, revenge for your actual lord, which presumably was not the abbot or the prior.

These are incredible stories and it's such fun to talk to you. I think, I mean, I could ask you plenty of other questions, but I have one more and it's a little bit silly. I wanted to know, I read that one of your students called you the Cardiff University's resident queen of Wikipedia. And I wondered if you could explain that to me, how you came to wear that crown. Yes.

This is terrible. I know. So, I mean, so there is no point in as an academic kind of pretending that our students don't look on Wikipedia and there's no point in pretending that we as academics don't use it, right? If I want to know the dates of a particular king,

the first thing I do is of course Google it, Wikipedia comes up, "Hey, Preston, now I have some dates." I may go and just fact check that afterwards, but it's a pretty easy way to find things out. And so I tend to be completely honest with my students that this is the case. And as a consequence, I've started to engage with my students at the level of what can we change from the things that are available in Wikipedia?

So we know that there are things on there that is not necessarily accurate. Can we provide better reference for it and so on? So I've worked quite a lot with my students in class, kind of trying to provide better referencing for some of this, showing what the evidence is that underpins some of these kind of stories or the histories around it. And I think this is very important for them to do because it's also a way for them to see that what

they are doing and what they are learning in the classroom has real applicability. And it's a really good way for them to also write for a kind of public audience where you have to be a little bit more broad. I mean, no one wants to know the kind of geeky stuff that I'm really interested in. You know, oh, what's the terminology of a spy? How many different terminology in Latin can I find for spy, right? You know, the general public is not interested in this.

But what they want to know is some of the other kind of broad things. You know, why is it important to study espionage? Why is it, you know, we need to know about this particular treaty? Why is this important about exiles, for example? And why do they turn up in treaties so often? And so I try to kind of engage with my students at those kind of level and encourage them to write and engage with that. And I think it's a way to also give them great skills because we write a lot.

in essays and things, but actually once students come out in the real world, as I call it, the chances are they'll be writing very short pieces and distilling information in a very clear way. And Wikipedia is a really good way to kind of practice for them to do it. Well, I think they're lucky to have you and I think we are very lucky to get to speak with you as well. Thank you so much for coming here.

Thank you. It's been fabulous. Hope you've enjoyed listening to some of the stories about these spies. Thank you for tuning in for The Debrief. We hope you enjoyed that conversation between Jenny Benham and True Spies producer Morgan Childs.

More debriefs are available exclusively to Spyscape Plus subscribers. You'll also be able to access other premium series, like The Resume-Off Files, our ambitious retelling of Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes. And for true crime fans, there's The Great James Bond Car Robbery, the story of the hunt for James Bond's most notorious set of wheels. Subscribers also get new episodes of True Spies early and ad-free.

Subscribe to Spyscape Plus at plus.spyscape.com. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a friend? Sir Francis Walsingham, England's principal secretary of state, better known as England's first spy master. Walsingham was the man charged with keeping the Queen of England and her Protestant regime safe.

You have to remember that the Roman Catholic threat was not something that came out of the blue. It was real and it was growing by the day. In 1588, Walsingham was to face his greatest challenge, the Spanish Armada, a massive seaborne invasionary force commissioned by the Catholic King of Spain to overthrow the English Queen and banish her Protestant religion for good. I knew what these savages were capable of. I'd seen it with my own eyes.

It wasn't a choice. It was my calling.