There can have been few occasions in the course of recorded history when physical standards of well-being fell as sharply and as profoundly as they did after the legions had been withdrawn from Britain. But it may be questioned whether this was equally true of all levels of society. It is possible that the end of Roman rule was as little marked on the western and northern fringes of Britain as its establishment had been some four centuries earlier. There is, indeed, good evidence to suppose that the material culture of the late pre-Roman Iron Age continued with little significant change, not only through the centuries of Roman rule but also into those of the Anglo-Saxon conquest which followed. In cultural terms, the end of Roman rule was marked by the elimination of the upper strata of late Roman society. Villas were abandoned because the economic structure which had supported them had disintegrated. Towns ceased to be centres of urban life because their crafts and trade were no longer needed by a society increasingly rural and self-sufficient and because the machinery of government, which had centred in them, had disappeared. In Britain, there ceased, in any cultural sense, to be an élite. Material standards fell. It was not that villas and public buildings were no longer built; those that already existed were not even maintained in usable condition.