Then he joined Geoffrey Cotesford on the great north road, the old Roman route that ran from London to Scotland. Harry would have preferred to make his way by sea, which would have been far more comfortable, but Geoffrey pleaded poverty. So they clattered away in their cart, Harry wincing as they hit every pothole. In places the way was difficult because of fences left untended, bridges unrepaired, work left unfinished for more than a century because there was nobody to do it.

Geoffrey pointed out features of the landscape. ‘Still empty - I told you!’

Here was a town half given over to farmland. Here were villages abandoned altogether, the roofless houses slumped like old men, the fields overgrown. Swathes of the country had been given over to herds of sheep, which bleated piously as they nibbled the grass that grew around the ruins. Harry usually rode past such grassy mounds of tumbled walls and abandoned buildings without looking too closely; they were just part of the landscape. But Geoffrey was pitiless.

‘The country has a way of cleansing itself. Crows and rats and flies! Even they have a purpose in God’s grand scheme. But we have never come back, Harry; we have never taken back our villages.’

‘Why are we talking about the Big Death again?’

‘Because it shaped your family, Harry - or, rather, reshaped it. This is what I have discovered about you. The empty world after the Mortality was quite different from what went before. Suddenly there were too few folk to get the work done; a bad lord could not hold onto a man, for there was always work somewhere else. There were revolts as the nobles tried to stuff everything back into Pandora’s box, but it was too late. And opportunities opened up.’

‘Such as for my family.’

‘Yes! Your grandfathers saw the chance to slip the bonds of allegiance to the lords. You became merchants, wealthy in your own right, and you called yourselves Wooler - you had no surname I can trace before.’

‘And before the Mortality? What were we then?’

‘You were soldiers - perhaps all the way back to the days of William. It’s said you had an ancestor who came over with the Conqueror. But then every family in England says that. Certainly your forefathers fought alongside Edward Longshanks.’

‘The Hammer of the Scots.’ This story of a lost and different age rather thrilled Harry the merchant.

‘And before that they rode with him to the Holy Land, for Edward was a great crusader. But to your family the crusades weren’t a mere adventure. To them, the Holy Land was home - or had been.’