The density of burials at the site, accumulated over several centuries, also speaks to the long history of the church as a focal point for the community’s relationship with the dead.

Generation after generation of people who lived in Barton and its surrounding area were brought to this ground for burial.

Conquest Man was one of them, distinguished from most of the others by the specific character of his interment.

The Anglo-Scandinavian World He Belonged To

One of the most important things the research on Conquest Man illuminates is the complexity of the world England was in the eleventh century, a world that was neither simply “Anglo-Saxon” nor simply about the binary of Anglo-Saxon versus Norman, but was already deeply shaped by centuries of Scandinavian presence.

The Viking Age, conventionally dated from the late eighth century to the eleventh century, had transformed the British Isles in ways that went far beyond raiding.