How did this peculiar but important part of the Prefecture of the Gauls turn into Saxon England? The gloomy cataclysmic view of a violent debacle in the early fifth century is no longer held. It is known that by the end of the reign of Honorius (a.d. 423) Britain's revenues had been lost to the empire for ever. Honorius, when he recalled the last legions to help save Rome from the onslaughts of Alaric the Goth, had told the British towns after their pitiful appeal that ‘they must look after their own defences’, and had probably meant to return as former emperors had done. But the defence of the western empire never allowed time or men to recover the lost territory. What sort of fight the British put up when left as a civilian population, and attacked not only by Saxon pirates from the North Sea, but overrun by Picts and Scots who had finally breached the Wall, is still a matter for violent controversy. The discovery in the 1940s of the Mildenhall Treasure—a magnificent dinner-set in fine silver and pewter, depicting the triumph of Bacchus—would seem to prove that a prosperous Roman villa-owner, now left defenceless, with slaves in flight to join the Saxons, did what many Greeks and Italians did in 1940: buried his most valuable and heavy treasure and took to flight, first to the hills of the west country, where opposition continued longest, and then to Brittany, where the population was definitely altered by a largescale emigration from Britain.