The ordinary English man, the farmer whose field was destroyed, the craftsman whose town was occupied, the merchant whose trading relationships were disrupted, the man in a Humber port town who woke up in a different political world, does not appear in the Tapestry.

Conquest Man is the history the Tapestry does not tell.

He is not a named individual whose actions changed events.

He is one of the millions who were affected by those events without shaping them, who lived through one of the most dramatic political transformations in English history and whose experience of it is recoverable only through the evidence his bones and burial contain.

The juxtaposition of the Tapestry, embroidered, deliberate, propagandistic, a product of the Norman victors, with the facial reconstruction of a man who left no name in any document is a pointed comment on the kind of history science can now produce: bottom-up, from the body, from the grave goods, from the chemistry of teeth.