Who was he?

The science can describe him.

It can show you his face.

It can trace the movements of atoms through his teeth and bones and tell you something about where he spent his childhood.

It can read his DNA and tell you he had ancestry from the European continent.

But it cannot tell you his name.

It cannot say whether he fought at Hastings or watched from a distance.

It cannot explain why a man with Scandinavian burial practices was interred in a Norman knight’s church in a port town on the Humber.

That gap, between everything science can now reveal and the one thing it cannot, is what keeps Conquest Man’s story alive.

The Church At The Edge Of The River

Before you can understand who Conquest Man was, or might have been, you need to understand where he was found.

Barton-upon-Humber is a small town in what is now North Lincolnshire, England, sitting on the southern bank of the Humber estuary.

The Humber is a broad and powerful tidal river, not quite the Thames but significant, one of the major waterways of northern England.

It drains a vast catchment of inland rivers and has been a commercial and communications artery for as long as people have lived near it.