Malmesbury or is a market town and civil parish in the southern Cotswolds in the county of Wiltshire, England. Technology company Dyson is headquartered in Malmesbury which remains a market town and became prominent in the Middle Ages as a centre for learning focused on and around Malmesbury Abbey, the bulk of which forms a rare survival of the dissolution of the monasteries. Once the site of an Iron Age fort, in the Anglo-Saxon period it became the site of a monastery famed for its learning and one of Alfred the Great's fortified burhs for defence against the Vikings. Æthelstan, the first king of England was buried in Malmesbury Abbey when he died in 939.