Donated to the British Museum by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks in 1890, this bone plaque is one of the best runic finds in the East Midlands. Perhaps I’ll rank them one day in a Substack article- would you like that?

The bone plaque was made somewhere between the 8th and 10th centuries and found in what is now the modern-day city of Derby. It reads, godgecaþaræhad͡dan͡þiþiswrat, translated as ‘God save that Hadda who wrote this’.

Professor John Hines (Cardiff University) examined the bone in 2026, and in his unpublished report states that, "… this inscription is the only runic inscription from Anglo-Saxon England which declares itself to have been made by a woman".

The name Hadda is an attested masculine name, but as John Hines points out, the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ (rendered þaræ in the text) is in the feminine, not the masculine, and so the personal name is that of a woman.

📸 Image: The British Museum