Siward Barn
He appears in the extant sources in the period following the Norman Conquest of England, joining the northern resistance to William the Conqueror by the end of the 1060s.
Siward's resistance continued until his capture on the Isle of Ely alongside Æthelwine, Bishop of Durham, Earl Morcar, and Hereward ("the Wake") as cited in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Firm evidence of Siward's later life is non-existent, but some historians have argued that he took up a career in the Varangian Guard at Constantinople, in the service of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.
The sources upon which this theory is based also allege that Siward led a party of English colonists to the Black Sea, who renamed their conquered territory New England.
[3] Historian and translator of Orderic, Marjorie Chibnall, pointed out that this Siward is mentioned later in his Ecclesiastical History as a Shropshire landowner, in connection with the foundation of Shrewsbury Abbey.
[7] Margaret Faull and Marie Stinson, the editors of the Philimore Domesday Book for Yorkshire, believed that Siward was "a senior member of the house of Bamburgh and possibly a brother or half-brother of Earl Gospatric".
[8] Another historian, Geoffrey Barrow, pointed out that Faull and Stinson gave no evidence for this assertion, and doubted the hypothesis because of Siward's Danish name.
[10] It was serious enough to worry King William, who marched north and began the construction of castles at Warwick, Nottingham, York, Lincoln, Huntingdon and Cambridge.
Waltheof, Gospatric (Gaius Patricius), Mærle-Sveinn (Marius Suenus), Elnoc, Arnketil, and the four sons of Karle were in the advance guard and led the Danish and Norwegian forces.
[19] William held Christmas court at the ruined city of York, and brought Waltheof and Gospatric back into his peace at the River Tees.
[26] In Berkshire, Greenham (£8), Lockinge (£10) and Stanford in the Vale (£30; now in Oxfordshire); in Gloucestershire, Lechlade (£20); in Warwickshire, Grendon (£2), Burton Hastings (£4) and Harbury (£2); in Derbyshire, Brassington (£6), Croxhall (£3), Catton (£3), Cubley (£5), Norbury and Roston (£5), Duffield (£9), Breadhall (£4), "Wormhill" (waste) and Moreley (waste); in Nottinghamshire, Leake (£6) and Bonnington (s. 6); in Yorkshire Adlingfleet (£4); in Lincolnshire, Whitton (£10) and Haxey (5); and in Norfolk Sheringham (£4) and Salthouse (£2).
[33] A French chronicle which ends in 1219, known as the Chronicon Laudunensis (or Chronicon universale anonymi Laudunensis, "the anonymous universal chronicle of Laon") and the 14th century Icelandic text, the Játvarðar Saga, a short saga devoted to the life of Edward the Confessor, both relate a story about English warriors who sail to Constantinople to escape the dominion of the Normans, and found a colony in the Black Sea called New England.
[36] According to both sources, Siward and some of the English expressed their desire to have a territory of their own, and so Alexius told them of a land over the sea that had formerly been part of the empire, but was now occupied by heathens.
[37] The land, the sources allege, lay "6 days north and north-east of Constantinople", a distance and direction that puts the territory somewhere in or around the Crimea and Sea of Azov.
