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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the writer, historian and illustrator, Amy Jeffs, whose new book is Saints, a new legendary of

heroes, humans and magic, and it follows her best-selling books, Storyland and Wild.

Amy, this is a kind of fantastic compendium of saints' lives, of which most of us reading now

will have known nothing. How did you find this kind of

cache of, as it were, hidden history? And why is it so hidden? Well, I do feel like I really found

a cache of hidden objects at the British Museum. When I was 24 or so, I started, I stood working in the British Museum, digitising and recatalogging their collection of pilgrim souvenirs.

And they've got over 730 souvenirs, but also secular badges.

I'm going to be really careful to say badges because multiple times the months, 10 years, people have thought I've been digitising medieval badges, as in the mammal.

So I have to be very careful there.

So badges for the rest of this thing I'm talking about.

Yeah, exactly.

There's a collection of over 730 medieval badges and pilgrim souvenirs.

These are objects sold at shrine sites, made from very cheap materials like a lead

tin alloy is the most common, and also livery badges and maybe kind of obscene badges or

badges showing motifs from everyday life that people wore and ordinary people wore. And these

are like souvenirs from the pilgrim trail?

Yeah, so the pilgrim ones, some of them are just holy images like St Christopher Badges

...