The Franks Casket is an eighth century Anglo-Saxon box, carved from whale’s bone. Its subject matter is eclectic, with reliefs illustrating scenes from Christian, Roman, and Germanic legend, and inscriptions which pass between Old English and Latin, written both in Anglo-Saxon runes and the Roman alphabet. The inscriptions share some thematic material (a motif of exile and displacement), but are largely disjointed. The casket may have been originally intended to hold a psalter or the Gospels; sometime before the nineteenth century it came into the possession of a middle class family in Auzon, France, where it served as a sewing box before arriving at its current home, the British Museum.