Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's Best

Selling History Magazine. I'm Ellie Corporn. Forgery was the white lie of the medieval

era, with some of Europe's leading holy men cooking up counterfeit documents to rewrite

the past as they thought it should have happened. These forged texts are the subject of today's

conversation, with Levi Roach, Associate Professor of History at the University of Exeter,

and the author of Forgery in Memory at the end of the first millennium. Levi also wrote a feature

on medieval Forgeries for the February issue of BBC History Magazine, and our content director,

David Musgrove, called him to find out more. Levi's been on the podcast before, so good to have

you back. Thanks for joining us again. I'm very well. Thank you for having me. You've written a feature

for BBC History Magazine on this topic of Forgery in Memory. In it, you say, in your opening

section, few regions in world history can rival medieval Europe for the sheer scale of forging.

So that's quite an exciting comment. We need to find out what's going on. So drop us into it.

Who was forging what? So what we're talking about is largely religious establishments. So

religious houses like monasteries and cathedrals, forging above all documents,

legal documents that we call charters, particularly securing them rights over property,

or often also rights to preferential treatment. So sometimes rights to remove them from the authority,

say, of the king or of their local bishops, if we're dealing with monasteries or smaller religious

houses. And is this a wide European thing, or specifically British, where's the main geographic

areas? It's something we see across Western Europe, and indeed pretty much anywhere where we have

rich documentary records and people are valuing charters, people are also forging them. So we can

sort of see a growth in tandem of the use of the written word over the Middle Ages, and then the

recourse to forgery, because the more people value written documents, the more likely people are

...