In 1982, a gold medallion about the size of an American fifty-cent piece was found in a field in Suffolk. It had been dropped or buried by one of the very earliest of the intruders, sometime between A.D. 450 and 480. The medallion bears a runic inscription that says (or at least is thought to say): “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman.” Not perhaps the most profound of statements, but it is the earliest surviving example of Anglo-Saxon writing in Britain. It is, in other words, the first sentence in English.
