Rethinking the ‘migration period’Did ‘the Anglo-Saxon migrations’ take place, and were Romano-British leaders replaced by those of Germanic descent? The young Turks who set about challenging old paradigms did not, on the whole, follow this thinking through to the post-Roman period, however. Reviewing events across the Empire during this period, one recently published book summed up Britain in the post-Roman period in a sentence: invaded by Anglo-Saxons who slowly conquered more and more of Britain, displacing the native British population who retreated, defeated, into Wales. Early medieval buildings may have been more ephemeral than Roman ones, but they were not necessarily any less elaborate (CA 343). Indeed, his reminiscences took for granted the continuity of Romanised rural life in north-west Britain in the early to mid-5th century.