The first three chapters of this book focused on texts or objects produced as the English turned back to the past to create either an image of who they were in the present and/or to find an image that responded to the concerns of the troubled or difficult present in which they found themselves, while at the same time encrypting the violence of their own creation as a culture and nation. The actions of encrypting violence and of looking to the past as a way of creating, justifying, or, less frequently, critiquing a communal identity in and for the present have been repeated throughout history. Many countries and communities turn to the past for a sense of who they are and where they have come from but few, if any, have used those pasts to create phenomena as problematic and haunted as Anglo-Saxonism and the British Empire. The Anglo-Saxon migration myth in particular has been used both to justify colonialism and to exclude unwanted refugees and migrants. The promotion of the English language as a language that unites people, as it did in Alfred's vision, has been transformed into an often weaponised English used to exclude non-English speakers from nations or communities, as a means of depriving some people of their mother tongue, and as an omnipresence that marginalises and limits the study of other languages. In his campaign to become prime minister, Boris Johnson pledged to make those immigrants allowed into the country learn English and use it as a first language. To learn the language of the country in which one settles is one thing, but to force people to do so is quite another. Moreover, the idea that a language acquired through such a process could ever be a first language erases the cultures, histories, and diversity of those settled in the UK as effectively as did Alfred's promotion of political unity through English in the ninth century – and, like it, runs the risk of resulting in split selves that become part of, yet always never quite at home in, both the dominant and dominated communities.