North of the River Humber, where Saxon settlement was thinner, it may be that there was something like an ‘elite transfer’ model, with the settlers taking over a functioning society. In the Midlands, meanwhile, certain cemeteries suggest we might be looking at a migration of male warriors who married local British women, and in the south and south-east, as we’ve seen, there may have been interaction that went beyond one group slaughtering or enslaving the other.50
