These are not exotic imports.

They are the local customs of a community shaped by its Scandinavian heritage, persisting alongside and integrated with Christian burial practice.

The Larger Question Of Identity In Medieval England

The medieval concept of identity was different from the modern one in ways that are relevant to interpreting Conquest Man’s burial.

Modern identity is often thought of in terms of ethnicity, nationality, or cultural belonging in ways that depend on concepts developed largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The idea that being English meant something in ethnic or biological terms that was distinct from being Norman or Danish or Flemish was not, in most cases, how people in the eleventh century understood themselves.