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Let's suppose Henry V of England had the time and inclination to recruit a few specialized and trained agents. What do they do?

  • Master themselves of many languages
  • Enter cities and disguise as a local (in a village hamlet, outsiders will be spotted even if they can pass off the local customs)
  • Pay actual (obviously non loyal) locals to keep eyes and ears open
  • Smuggle stuff
  • Keep horses hidden around (some free peasants/levies/militia were actually gifted horses by grateful lords so a farmer having a horse would be unusual but not unheard of) that are ready to be ridden by an unfamiliar rider at a moment's notice (some horses are finicky about riders)
  • Collect information (laughably easier than you might think, in these days anyone with fancy cloths can usually bluff their way into the same room as a monarch as long as it's a big room like a throne room and not private quarters, it was after too many notables were killed in gunpowder assassinations that security started tightening)
  • Be able to move around in night without making noises and be easily observable in the mains streets
  • Able to live "off the land" in plains and forests for over a week
  • Ready to steal stuff (this is harder than getting in the same building as a king, anything worth stealing usually were secured, but hey CK2 has some events like this... more seriously burglary was always a crime since ever, why can't you train someone to do it better than a run-out-of-mill criminal?)
Someone suggested to me this alt-Henry V's stealth corps ought to be called the Arcani, after their Roman equivalent, which was supposedly first use in Roman Britain.

I forgot about this for awhile until I made a French Revolution thread and someone mentioned the SAS.

Anyways, is there a cool name for them in either English or Anglo-Norman that has the acronym SAS without using "service"?
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