# The Franks Casket > Unknown Northumbrian monastic workshop - First half of the 8th century AD, most commonly given as c. 700-750 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/anonymous-northumbrian-workshop/franks-casket-british-museum/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-27 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown Northumbrian monastic workshop - **Date:** First half of the 8th century AD, most commonly given as c. 700-750 - **Medium:** Carved whale bone (whale ivory), knife-cut in flat low relief; originally fitted with silver hinges, clasps, a lock and a carrying handle, all now lost - **Dimensions:** 22.9 x 19 x 10.9 cm (British Museum's own published figures for length, width and height). One frequently reproduced secondary figure instead gives 12.9 x 22.9 x 19.1 cm for the same three axes in a different order; this record follows the British Museum's own figures and flags the variant rather than silently picking one. - **Object type:** Antiquity - **Period:** Anglo-Saxon, early 8th century, Northumbria - **Current location:** The lid and four of the five carved faces (front, back, left side, and the reconstructed casket as a whole, displayed with a modern cast standing in for the missing fifth face) are held by the British Museum, London. The original right-hand end panel is a separate object in separate custody: it is held by the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, and does not travel with the British Museum's holding. - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary A small Anglo-Saxon box carved from whale bone in Northumbria in the early eighth century, covered on every face with narrative scenes and inscribed in a mixture of runes, Old English, Latin and Roman capitals, including a riddle on its own front panel that names the material it is made from. Its imagery mixes the Christian Adoration of the Magi with the Germanic legend of Weland the Smith's revenge, the Roman foundation story of Romulus and Remus, the Roman emperor Titus's capture of Jerusalem in AD 70, and, on its right-hand end, a scene that has resisted every attempt at a settled reading for more than a century.That right-hand panel is also the key to the object's modern history, because it is not in the same museum as the rest of the box. The casket served for generations as a family sewing box in the French village of Auzon, in the Haute-Loire, and had already lost its silver fittings and fallen apart before it reached the antiquities trade; Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks bought the surviving lid, front, back and two long sides in Paris in 1857 and gave them to the British Museum in 1867. The right end had already gone missing by then. It surfaced separately, passed through a Lyon collector's estate, and entered the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, where it was identified in 1890 as the casket's lost fifth face. The British Museum has displayed a cast of it ever since; the only ancient original is in Florence.Nothing about the casket's maker, patron or exact place of manufacture is documented. Everything known rests on the language of its own inscriptions and on a hundred and fifty years of runological argument that remains, on its hardest question, unresolved. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **early 8th century AD** Unknown Northumbrian monastic workshop and its original patron or recipient `[documented]` (origin) Manufacture in a Northumbrian monastic milieu is the scholarly consensus, established from the language of the inscriptions and comparison with Northumbrian manuscript art; the specific house, patron and recipient are not documented and remain disputed or unknown. - **undated** Possibly the church of Saint-Julien, Brioude, Haute-Loire, France `[disputed]` (gap) W.H.J. Weale proposed that the casket had belonged to this church and may have been removed during the French Revolution. No source consulted confirms or documents this link, and this record treats it as a proposed, unproven possibility rather than an established stage in the object's history. - **-by the mid-19th century** A family in Auzon, Haute-Loire, France `[documented]` (gap) The casket, already missing its right-hand end panel, was in the possession of a family in Auzon, where it served as a household sewing or work box. No record establishes when or how it reached this family. - **mid-19th century** A family in Auzon, Haute-Loire, France `[documented]` (damage) A son of the family traded the casket's silver hinges and fittings for a silver ring; without the metal fittings, the casket's carved plaques came apart from one another. - **c. 1850s** Professor Mathieu, Clermont-Ferrand `[documented]` (transfer) The disassembled pieces (excluding the already-separated right panel) were shown to a Professor Mathieu, from nearby Clermont-Ferrand, who passed them on to the Paris antiquities trade. - **c. 1850s-1857** An unnamed antiquities dealer, Paris `[documented]` (sale) The pieces were sold into a Paris antique shop; no source consulted names the dealer. - **1857-1867** Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks `[documented]` (purchase) Franks bought the surviving lid, front, back and both long sides in Paris in 1857, recognising the pieces as Anglo-Saxon. No source consulted records the price paid. - **1867-present** British Museum, London `[documented]` (gift) Franks gave the four faces and lid to the British Museum in 1867; registered 1867,0120.1. This is the origin of the object's modern name. The Museum has since displayed the group with a modern cast standing in for the missing right panel. - **undated** The Auzon family (again) `[documented]` (rediscovery) Separately from the 1857 sale, the original right-hand panel was found afterward, still with the Auzon family, in a drawer. No source consulted gives an exact date for this find. - **undated** Louis Carrand, Lyon `[documented]` (purchase) The rediscovered right panel passed to the Lyon-based collector Louis Carrand. No source consulted gives the date or price of this transaction. - **-1890** Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence `[documented]` (bequest) On Carrand's death his collection, including the panel, passed to the Bargello, where it is catalogued as Carrand no. 25. - **1890-present** Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence `[documented]` (identification) The Swedish scholar Sigurd Soderberg published the identification of the Bargello panel as the Franks Casket's missing right end in 1890, proposing an initial reading of its central scene. The panel has remained in the Bargello, physically separate from the British Museum's four pieces, ever since. ## Open questions - What does the Bargello right panel actually depict? At least eight distinct scholarly readings (Sigurd's death, Hengist and Horsa, a sacred grove and its deity, Nebuchadnezzar's madness, the death of Balder, Rhiannon's penance, a Satan/Nativity scene, and a female drink-bearer performing a mortuary ritual) have been proposed since 1890, and Raymond Page's verdict that 'none convinces' has not been overturned by any single reading achieving consensus. - What was the casket's original function? Proposed answers range from a secular treasure box to a container for relics or precious objects; no source consulted establishes which, if either, is correct. - Exactly where in Northumbria was it made, and for or by whom? Ripon, Lindisfarne and Monkwearmouth-Jarrow have all been proposed as candidate monastic centres, with no single site confirmed, and a minority view argues for East Anglia instead of Northumbria altogether. - Did the casket belong to the church of Saint-Julien at Brioude before reaching Auzon, as W.H.J. Weale proposed, and was it removed during the French Revolution? No source consulted resolves this; it remains a disputed, unconfirmed link in the object's history. - How and when did the casket travel from wherever it was made in Northumbria to nineteenth-century France? No source consulted documents any stage of this journey; the centuries between manufacture and the nineteenth-century Auzon household are simply undocumented. - Did the casket originally carry paint or other colour on its carved surfaces? No source consulted for this record reports surviving pigment evidence either way. - Was the casket's intended recipient the historical Abbot Eigil of Fulda, as J. Huston McCulloch has recently proposed? This is a new argument, not yet adopted or rebutted by the wider field at the time of writing. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Franks Casket', consolidating panel descriptions, inscriptions, the decipherment history and the Auzon/Bargello provenance chain. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Leslie Webster's 2012 'Objects in Focus' monograph and Raymond Page's 1999 study. - [2] The British Museum Images, catalogue caption for the Franks Casket (accession 1867,0120.1), giving material, dimensions and provenance summary. - [3] Marijane Osborn and Terry Gunnell, 'Swedish Iconography of Drink-Bearer and Horse on the Northumbrian Franks Casket', Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, vol. 51, e12 (14 May 2025), DOI 10.1017/ean.2025.6. - [4] J. Huston McCulloch, 'The Franks Casket: A Celebration of the Founding and Destiny of Anglo-Saxon England', personal research page hosting the author's own 2004 photograph of the Bargello original panel and citing his article in Anglia 144.2 (2026): 203-232. - [5] Diana Ellis, 'The Franks Casket', University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre, Electronic Introduction to Old English reference page, arguing (against the Northumbrian consensus it also documents) for an East Anglian origin. - [6] Andrew West, 'Franks Casket', BabelStone, giving panel-by-panel runic transliteration and translation and noting the Unicode 7.0 encoding of the right panel's cipher vowels. - [7] Alfred Becker, 'Franks Casket' (franks-casket.de), covering construction, the Auzon find, Franks's acquisition and the Bargello panel's route via Louis Carrand of Lyon. - [8] Tha Engliscan Gesithas, 'The Franks Casket', overview of the object's discovery, Auzon history and acquisition by the British Museum. Secondary/enthusiast-society source, used only for details independently corroborated elsewhere in this record's sources. - [9] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Franks Casket, and the individual file pages cited in each gallery entry's credit, consulted for licence and photographer verification. - [10] The British Museum, collection online, object 1867,0120.1 'The Franks Casket' / 'The Auzon Casket' - fetched directly via browser this run after the bot-block the research agent hit; confirms museum number, dimensions (10.90 x 22.90 x 19 cm), Room 41 Case 2 display location, and states in its own condition note: 'The right-hand side is a replica; the original is in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (Carrand Coll. no. 25).' --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.