Most church excavations yield dozens of burials, perhaps a few hundred.

To recover nearly three thousand individuals from a single site, spanning more than a millennium of burial practice, gives archaeologists an exceptional dataset for studying how burial customs, health patterns, population composition, and social organization changed over time in a single English community.

Conquest Man was one burial within this larger population.

He was notable from the beginning because of the conditions of his burial: the intact oak coffin, the grass pillow, the chalk blocks, the apple wood staffs.

These features, combined with the dendrochronological date of the coffin wood, marked him as an individual of particular archaeological interest.