The vast majority of people who were alive in 1066, who experienced the Conquest and its aftermath, who rebuilt their lives in the new Norman world or failed to, who had children and grandchildren who became the English of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are invisible in the named record.

They are present only in aggregate statistics, in archaeological evidence, in the genetic heritage of the populations that descended from them.

Conquest Man is a representative of this invisible majority.

His specific identity remains unknown, but his existence, his particular body with its particular history, his specific burial with its specific mixture of practices, his DNA with its evidence of continental connection, is a specific window into that invisible majority.

The gap between what science can establish and what it cannot, the face but not the name, keeps the story of Conquest Man intellectually honest.