to ask for their [women's] advice, or lightly disregard their replies." Challenges to the historical accuracy of the comitatus Tacitus supplies much of what scholars believe to know about the customs of Germanic tribes, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, before they came to Britain during the fifth century and converted to Christianity. However, Tacitus's Germania must be viewed critically because his descriptions of the Germans were partly used to criticize what he viewed was the corruption and softness of the Roman empire around 100 A.D. In addition, much of Tacitus's information is not first hand knowledge but information he collected from others. Much of the evidence supporting the comitatus occurs centuries after the writings of Tacitus and are presented through oral heroic poetry. As a result, the comitatus is generally viewed more by scholars as a literary ideal rather than a historical reality. Regarding sources that support the comitatus, Stephen Morillo claims, "Few topics in early medieval history are as obscure as the comitatus, or warband, perhaps the basic social and military unit of organization among the post-Roman ruling classes. Because the warband members were almost all illiterate, their world must come to us either through heroic oral poetry (often not recorded until long after the period in which the oral tradition thrived) or through hostile clerical chroniclers with little sympathy for warband values." Stephen S. Evans, who examines the comitatus in England during the period between the fifth and eighth centuries, admits, "Given the dearth of sources for this period as well as the differing rates of development of the various kingdoms, it is impossible to determine the precise degree to which the image of the comitatus manifested itself in the historical record at any given time or place." Although Tacitus's work describes Germania in the late first century, there is also no guarantee that Germanic societies were the same when they arrived to England in the fifth century. See also References Enright, M.J., Lady with a Mead Cup: Ritual, Prophecy, and Lordship in the European Warband. Dublin, 1976 Cultural conventions Early Germanic warfare Indo-European warfare