>Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen.

I'll admit part of the difficulty there was that I'd skipped the ends of earlier chapters because they were too easy, so I was missing some context like this

>Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)

Foes sounds right yeah. I think there was another word at some point where a prefixed "I" seemed to indicate that the thing was "to me", and -an feels right to be an old plural form. I can't think of any straight away but instinctively I feel like there are words in modern English that pluralise similarly, perhaps in the names of some old organisations?

>Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?

That's the one. I don't remember exactly who they were but my memory is that she managed to be the spouse of two Anglo-Saxon kings, sometime not too long before William arrived