The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England

by Marc Morris

The Britons were not massacred or expelled en masse by this minority but remained in place, and eventually adopted the language, religion and culture of the newcomers. Historians call this an ‘elite transfer’ model. Such a model, of course, serves to confound the traditional interpretation of the archaeology, for it raises the possibility that people found buried with Saxon grave goods might not be migrants at all, or even the descendants of migrants, but Britons who have embraced Saxon culture.43

Some of the pots used for cooking were cremation urns, excavated from ancient Roman cemeteries and emptied of their human remains. This was in every sense a degraded society, sifting through the detritus of an earlier civilization, in which life for the majority was almost impossibly grim. These Britons may have been living in an Iron Age hill fort, but in technological and material terms they had slipped back to the Bronze Age.