Two UK medieval history professors say that a manuscript once considered to be an unofficial copy of Magna Carta—bought for $27.50 almost 80 years ago—is now believed to be a genuine version dating from 1300.
David Carpenter of King's College London and Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia, Norwich say they have authenticated the document, known as “HLS MS 172”, which is stored in Harvard Law School library’s online collection.
Carpenter told The Guardian: “I was trawling through all these online statute books trying to find unofficial copies of the Magna Carta and I immediately thought: my god this looks for all the world like an original of [King] Edward I’s confirmation of Magna Carta in 1300, though of course appearances are deceptive.”
Carpenter and Vincent believe the document was issued to the former parliamentary borough of Appleby in Cumbria in 1300. It then passed down through an aristocratic family of the 18th century, the Lowthers, who later gave it to the slavery abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.
Through Clarkson’s estate, it passed to the First World War veteran Forster Maynard who consigned the document to Sotheby’s, where it was bought by the London bookdealers Sweet & Maxwell in 1946. Harvard Law School library bought the stained and faded copy of the document from Sweet & Maxwell the same year.
Harvard Law School paid $27.50, then about £7, for the document which was described in the Sotheby’s auction catalogue as a “copy made in 1327… somewhat rubbed and damp-stained”. The manuscript's purchase price of $27.50 would be about $450 (£339) today.
Vincent told the Harvard Law Today journal: “The provenance of this document is just fantastic. Given where it is, given present problems over liberties, over the sense of constitutional tradition in America, you couldn’t invent a provenance that was more wonderful than this.”
Magna Carta is a document created in 1215 that established human rights for English citizens. “Magna Carta set out the laws which the King [the then monarch King John] and everyone else had to follow for the first time,” a UK Parliament text says. There are four copies of the 1215 issue and seven of King Edward I’s 1300 version, including Harvard's newly discovered text.
Carpenter and Vincent used ultraviolet light images made by Harvard Law School librarians to match the document to the original versions. The two professors realised that the dimensions of the Harvard document, 19.2in by 18.6in, were the same as the six previously known originals overseen by Edward I.
The handwriting—the large capital ‘E’ at the start in ‘Edwardus’ and the elongated letters in the first line—also matches the original versions. The “HLS MS 172” Magna Carta subsequently passed the authenticity test “with flying colours”, said the pair of professors.
A copy of Magna Carta sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2007 for $21.3m. The document, dating from 1297, is housed at the National Archives in Washington.
