Fahrenheit A.D. 467 – Apologies to Ray Bradbury

VDH ^ | July 21, 2004 | Honora Howell Chapman

[quidnunc]

I have an idea: let’s send Michael Moore with his camera in a time machine back to fifth-century Britannia, decades after the Romans have stopped replenishing troops there, so that he can reveal the tragic consequences of Britons befriending Saxons (à la the Bushes and the Saudis with bin Laden clan) initially in order to fight off nasty Picts descending from Scotland to the north. (“Pict” is Latin for “painted.”) Imagine the conspiracy theories Moore could conjure up for our viewing pleasure, e.g., Unocal in cahoots with the Picts actually funded the building of Hadrian’s Wall — he has the incriminating tablets! Also, picture Moore slipping north beyond the wall, with unkempt hair, smeared and tattooed with the blue dye of the woad plant. Not a pretty sight — actually, pretty darn terrifying. The new swords-and-sandals “King Arthur” film does, in fact, make a bizarrely appropriate counterpart to Moore’s documentary.

But seriously, one possible lesson from this fifth-century debacle of western Roman political and military disintegration is rather clear (of course, we can quibble over the details, which is what we academics do best): combine really bad international policy with a weakened military, disease, and ineffective local government, and watch a civilization be overrun by the “barbarians.” The Britons themselves had once been considered barbarians, too, by the Romans back in the first century B.C. when Julius Caesar failed to take the island — times change, people change. Now Britain, abandoned by the central Roman government and left to fend for itself, was basically fed to the wolves — or, more precisely, it fed itself to the wolves. According to Bede in his History of the English Church and People, in the middle of the fifth century the Briton King Vortigern (check out http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/artsou/ammian.htm for Ammianus Marcellinus on fourth-century Britain) invited the Germanic Angles and Saxons to Britain, and they “were granted lands in the eastern part of the island on condition that they protect the country: nevertheless, their real intention was to subdue it.” (Bede, History 1.15) History is so messy — “friends” so easily become “enemies,” given a little incentive.

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