These Are The Only Four Surviving Original Manuscripts of Poetry in Old English
For having given birth to the modern English language, you would think that Old English - the now defunct language spoken in medieval Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers - would have a lot of surviving written records....
https://www.neatorama.com/2018/11/16/These-Are-The-Only-Four-Surviving-Original-Manuscripts-of-Poetry-in-Old-English/