Anglo-Saxon’ England has always been an imaginary place. The Romans called the island Britannia based on the Brittonic Priden, modern Welsh Prydain, and the Angles and the Saxons were but two of the Germanic peoples that settled on the island in the years during and after the departure of the Romans. The nation and the people to which they gave their name were from the start comprised of multiple ethnic identities and maintained a number of differing political and cultural allegiances. Most notably there were the Britons who had occupied the land long before the arrival of the Romans, as well as the Picts and eventually the Scots, but also the descendants of the Romans and those of other ethnicities who had come to Britannia when it was part of the Roman Empire. There were other Germanic peoples such as the Franks and the Jutes who settled on the island at the same time as the Angles and Saxons, and there were the later invaders, settlers, and conquerors: the Danes, Norwegians, and Normans, and people from beyond the Continent. In time they all came to be known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons, whether during the historical period (ca. 500–1100) that now bears that name or over the course of the centuries as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came to be applied more broadly to anyone of English, British, or Germanic descent, and especially an English speaker. Anglo-Saxon England was a construct of the leaders and educated elite of the people who lived in England prior to the conquest of 1066, but it was continued and expanded by the Normans and their successors. What constitutes an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity continues to be imagined and reimagined today, often in violent, nationalist, and racist ways. While acknowledging its problematic nature, I retain the term Anglo-Saxon throughout this book because I am talking about an imagined place that was and is home to a specific type of identity, and about the ways in which this place and its inhabitants were reimagined from the sixth to the twenty-first century. I argue that Anglo-Saxon England is an ultimately empty space onto and into which identities and ideologies have been written, a floating signifier.