Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946.
That is about to change.
Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties.
It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.
“I never in all my life expected to discover a Magna Carta,” said David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London, describing the moment in December 2023 when he made the startling find.
The manuscript’s value is hard to estimate, although it is fair to say that its price tag of under $30 (about $500 today) must make it one of the bargains of the last century. A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.
Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, in eastern England, helped authenticate the text. He noted that the document, which bound the nation’s rulers to acting within the law, had resurfaced at a time when Harvard has come under extraordinary pressure from the Trump administration.
“In this particular instance we are dealing with an institution that is under direct attack from the state itself, so it’s almost providential it has turned up where it has at this particular time,” he said.
“You and I both know what that is!”
Providential or not, the discovery happened largely by chance.
Professor Carpenter was at home in Blackheath, south east London, plowing his way through Harvard Law School’s digital images as research for a book when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 — the catalog name for Harvard Law School Manuscript 172.
“I get down to 172 and it’s a single parchment sheet of Magna Carta,” he said. “And I think ‘Oh my god, this looks to me for all the world — because I read it — like an original.’”
Professor Carpenter emailed Professor Vincent, who was, at the time, at work in a library in Brussels. “David sent it with a message saying, ‘What do you think that is?’” said Professor Vincent. “I wrote back within seconds, saying, ‘You and I both know what that is!’”
The two academics were able to confirm the manuscript’s authenticity after Harvard Law School photographed it under ultraviolet light and then subjected it to various levels of spectral imaging, a technique which can enhance aspects of historical documents undetectable to the human eye.
Comparing it with six previously known originals from 1300, the professors found that the text matched, as did the dimensions — 489 mm x 473mm. The handwriting used in the manuscript, with a large capital “E” at the start in “Edwardus” and elongated letters in the first line, also tallied.
“It’s the best sort of thing that can happen to a librarian,” said Amanda Watson, assistant dean at Harvard Law School’s library. “This is our daily work to digitalize things, to preserve things, to save things, to open things up for people like David Carpenter.”
Ms. Watson said that the document itself had sometimes been put on display, but, as part of a large collection, it was not kept out permanently. The library has yet to decide whether it will now be made available to the public, but Ms. Watson said she “can’t imagine” that it would be sold.
“In the United States having things that are seven hundred years old is special,” added Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law and chair of the Harvard Law School library.
“The law of the land”
Magna Carta — “Great Charter” in Latin — has been used to justify many different causes over the centuries, sometimes on shaky historical ground. But it has evolved into a global symbol of the importance of fundamental freedoms, including habeas corpus. By limiting the power of the monarch, it came to represent the right to protection against arbitrary and unjust rule.
One of its most famous passages states: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”
First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore.
He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.
The document influenced the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights includes several provisions that are thought to descend from Magna Carta.
There are 25 original manuscripts of Magna Carta in all, produced at various times. Including the one at Harvard, only three are outside Britain.
Harvard Law School bought its version from a London legal book dealer, Sweet & Maxwell, which had in turn purchased the manuscript in December 1945 from Sotheby’s, the auctioneers.
In the 1945 auction catalog it was listed as a copy and with the wrong date (1327) and was sold for £42 — about a fifth of the average annual income in the United Kingdom at the time — on behalf of Forster Maynard, an Air Vice-Marshal who had served as a fighter pilot in World War I.
Air Vice-Marshal Maynard inherited it from the family of Thomas and John Clarkson, who were leading campaigners in Britain against the slave trade from the 1780s onward.
Professor Vincent believes the document could be a lost Magna Carta that was once issued to the former parliamentary borough of Appleby-in-Westmorland, in the north of England, and which was last mentioned in print in 1762.
While undoubtedly famous, many Britons seem to have a hazy knowledge of the document. Former prime minister David Cameron was famously unable to translate the term Magna Carta when asked by David Letterman on his late-night talk show in 2012.
But few doubt its significance in the evolution of Western notions of rights and freedoms. With some of those now more under threat, Professor Vincent said the discovery at Harvard was timely.
Magna Carta, he said, places the king under the rule of law. The “head of state cannot simply go against somebody because he doesn’t like them, he has to do it using the law,” he said.
The text of the charter is incorporated within 17 state constitutions of the United States, he added, “so there is more of it in American state law than there is in the U.K.”
Professor Vincent likened the discovery to happening upon a masterpiece by Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch artist, only 36 of whose paintings are known to have survived. “He is regarded as the rarest of all the great masters, so there are significantly fewer of these than there are of Vermeers,” Professor Vincent said.
Both he and Professor Carpenter plan to visit Harvard Law School next month to see and touch the document for the first time, a moment that Professor Vincent predicted would be “emotional.”
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
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