People in medieval England identified themselves primarily through their local community, their faith community, their family and kinship networks, and their social position.

A man buried in St Peter’s in Barton around 1079 was, first and foremost, a member of that community, a Christian, a person with specific social relationships and obligations.

Whether his ancestors had come from Denmark, from Normandy, from Flanders, or from long-settled English stock was less determinative of his identity in practical terms than it might seem to later observers.

The Scandinavian descendants of the Danelaw had been Christian for generations by 1079.