As my eyes adjusted to the bright light I saw that I was lying on a grassy bank. About three metres in front of my face was a haze of white dust kicked up by the feet of passers-by and a herd of a cattle. Pint-sized cattle, I realised, because their shoulders barely reached the chest of the teenaged boy who was driving them with expert flicks from a long-handled whip. The mini-cows were followed by a stream of strangely dressed people all carrying sacks over their shoulders or satchels under their arms. They mostly wore long tunics of russet, green or brown, with caps and hoods upon their heads, some bare-legged others in tights. I decided to stop looking at them and concentrated on sitting up instead.

Oxford Circus is fifteen kilometres from the nearest farm – had I been moved?

I tried to work some saliva into my mouth – somebody had to have something to drink. And soon.

A couple of metres away a trio of disreputable-looking white guys was staring at me. Two of them were bare-chested, wearing nothing but loose linen trousers that were rolled into their belts and barely reached their knees. Their shoulders were ropey with muscle and sheened with sweat. One had a couple of nasty red welts striped down his upper arm. They had dirty white linen caps upon their heads and both were sporting neatly trimmed beards.

The third man was better dressed. He wore an emerald tunic with fine embroidery around the neck and armholes over a brilliantly white linen undershirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The tunic was cinched with a leather belt, an elaborate buckle that supported a classic English arming sword with a cruciform hilt contrary to section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 which prohibits the carrying of blades in a public place. He had black hair cut into a pageboy, pale skin and dark blue eyes – he looked familiar to me. As if I knew his brother or something.

‘Has he been burnt?’ asked one of the half-naked men.

‘Only by the sun,’ said the man with the sword. ‘He’s a blackamoor.’

‘Is he a Christian?’

‘A better Christian than you I think,’ said the man with a sword. He gestured in a direction behind the men. ‘Is that not your master? Should you not be about your work?’

The silent member of the pair spat into the ground while his friend jerked his chin in my direction. ‘It was us who dug him up,’ he said.