What it does not show is the face of an ordinary man in a Humber port town who had nothing to do with the high politics of the Conquest but whose life was completely transformed by it.

Conquest Man represents something the Tapestry cannot.

He is the other history, not the chronicle of the powerful but the life of someone who did not get recorded, who left no documents bearing his name, who cannot be found in any monastery’s list of donors or any lord’s roll of tenants.

He survives only in his bones and in the objects placed beside him in a coffin made from an oak tree that was felled thirteen years after Hastings.

The facial reconstruction gives him a face that the historical record never preserved.