Terry Jones will be best-remembered for playing Maria in Life of Brian (1979) in which she proclaims indignantly that her son is “not the messiah, but a very naughty boy.”

Every death being an encounter, I was surprised to learn that Jones was also a popular historian.

In ‘The Knight’ episode of Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives (2004) Jones explains how the English word knight stems from the Germanic word knecht, two words which have since then have become to denote opposite things. In Dutch, the ‘knecht’ (also the name for a farmhand now) is the one who helps the knight, a page boy really.