I begin chronologically in the middle, in the ninth century with King Alfred (r. 871–99) and the famous Preface to his translation of Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralis composed in the period 890–93. I begin in the middle because that is where utopia begins. Utopia is never in the present but always located elsewhere, in another place, in a past golden age, or in an anticipated future, a future often based on the idea of a past golden age from which something lost needs to be recovered or rebuilt. However, while utopia is never located in the present it is always a product of the present, a present that is in some way at odds with itself. In looking persistently back or elsewhere utopia is melancholic rather than nostalgic. There is a sadness for what has been lost, or what it is imagined has been lost, but that sadness can also be a catalyst for action in the present rather than longing for a simple return of the past, and this is the case with Alfred. He remembers a lost kingdom very different from the conflicted and violent one about which Gildas and, to a lesser extent, Bede had written. He remembers a kingdom filled with peace, learning, and languages, and his melancholy motivates a plan for the creation of a new age of peace and learning and a new linguistic community, and not a simple return to or re-creation of the past. But his memories are also of an imagined England that never existed, an island that still survived as an identifiable place but that was now an occupied space. His is a fictional story of a past that grows out of the gap created by the invasions and settlements of the Vikings and the destruction and separation of English speakers and kingdoms from each other that he believes to have been the result of them. It is this empty space that Alfred desires to fill, but that space also encrypts the land that was filled by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ centuries before the arrival of the Vikings.