THE presence, or absence, of significant numbers of Britons in Anglo-Saxon England has recently been the subject of considerable debate, with scholars in several disciplines offering conflicting opinions. There are a number of key questions to which we would very much like answers. Whether or not there were many Britons within Anglo-Saxon England is just the starting point: if there were large numbers, how did they come to be there, what roles did they perform and what eventually happened to them? If there were only very few, then what became of the sub-Roman population of the lowland zone of the old diocese, and how should we explain particular instances when the presence of Britons is indicated very much later, for example, by place-name or literary evidence? And just what should we understand by the term ‘Britons’, both at different points in the past, and in our present? Should we define this term in racial, ethnic, linguistic and/or religious terms, and what baggage is it carrying? What should we read into Brittones in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, for example, or Bretwalas and Brettas in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle? What does walh signify in such place-names as Walton? And when we read in Domesday Book that one Grifin (the Welsh personal name Gruffudd) held Weston (Ches.) in 1066, should we suppose that he was an immigrant from Wales or were ‘Welsh’ names used in the eleventh-century western Midlands, much as they seem to have been in late seventh-century Northumbria and Wessex?