In this well-known passage from Alfred's preface to his translation of Gregory's Regula Pastoralis the king looks back to a glorious past in which Anglo-Saxon kings were pious, wise, and capable of both maintaining the peace and expanding their dominions. Although it may have been lost, this past was able to provide Alfred at the end of the ninth century with a vision of kingship and kingdom which could be used as both a model and a justification for his own political agenda in forging a future for the Angelcynn. If the great kings of the past were able to offer their people moral and intellectual leadership while simultaneously extending the land under their control, then so could Alfred, and his reign (871–99) thus came to be perceived as a revival of the original spirit of Anglo-Saxon leadership. In this respect Alfred very consciously occupies a temporal borderland from which he maps both the present and the future, a position that would equally consciously be adopted by later kings, most notably Edward the Confessor, the last of the ‘Cerdicing’ kings, as they continued the work of forging a nation begun by Alfred. In essence, what Alfred was doing was breaking with the past by returning to the past in order to transform it into a new image for a new regime.