Magna Carta 'copy' sold for $27 found to be priceless original

Yahoo

15-05-2025

A document bought in 1946 for $27.50 has been confirmed as an original royal issuing of Magna Carta potentially worth millions.
Harvard Law School purchased the copy in 1946, completely unaware that it was in fact a priceless original. London booksellers Sweet & Maxwell had previously bought the document from First World War flying ace Air Vice-Marshal Forster 'Sammy' Maynard for £42.
For context, an issuing of Magna Carta sold at Sotheby's in 2007 commanded a price of some $21 million.
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At its cataloguing in 1946 the document was believed to be a copy made in 1327, and described as "somewhat rubbed and damp-stained."
Tests were carried out on the document including a comparison of the handwriting and the text, as well as scans using UV light and multi-spectral imaging.
These confirmed that it was indeed the real deal, becoming only the 25th original issuing of Magna Carta by an English king known to still exist.
For comparison the Gutenberg Bible, one of the most highly sought after books in the world, has 49 copies in existence, while around 235 first folios of Shakespeare are thought to survive.
The task to identify the document was undertaken by Professors David Carpenter of King's College London and Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia.
'Harvard's Magna Carta deserves celebration, not as some mere copy, stained and faded, but as an original of one of the most significant documents in world constitutional history, a cornerstone of freedoms past, present and yet to be won,' said Prof Carpenter.
Prof Vicent highlighted just how rare the extraordinary document actually is.
'The comparison I would draw is the rarest painter known to everybody is Vermeer,' he said.
'There are I think, it's disputed, there are over 30 Vermeer paintings in existence and yet he is seen as the rarest painter in history.
'There are only now 25 of these Magna Carta originals. It is an extraordinary thing for anyone to possess.'
Magna Carta was first signed by King John at Runnymede in 1215 after a years-long war against his own barons.
Despite King John, known as "Lackland" due to his territorial losses, trying to walk back on the document just weeks later his son Henry III would reissue it during his own reign.
Successive kings would then issue their own hand-copied originals of Magna Carta. The last of these was commissioned by Edward I in 1300, and it's this last original issuing of the charter that the Harvard document was found to be.
The version issued by Henry III in 1225 would become the "definitive" text of Magna Carta, a charter which laid out key legal principles that would become foundational to UK law.
"Whenever in the 13th Century there was a dispute between the king and the nation, kings reissued Magna Carta on at least three occasions after 1225," said Prof Vincent.
This could have been a way for the king to try to placate any unruly barons by reaffirming the crown's commitment to the charter, which limited the crown's power and protected barons' interests.
'This one (Harvard's Magna Carta), the 1300 issue, is the last time it was issued as a single sheet document under the king's seal as an official endorsement of the settlement of Magna Carta, said Prof Vincent.
He added: 'Every county of England would originally have had a Magna Carta of each of those issues."
As for how the priceless document was mistaken for a later copy, Prof Vincent said: 'I think everyone was knackered at the end of the Second World War.
'I think whoever read it at Sotheby's and looked at it, I suspect what they thought was 'oh it can't be an original Magna Carta because we'd know about it'.
'They misread the date, they got the wrong king. They catalogued it as if it was a charter of Edward III, but in fact it's Edward I.
'For an amateur that's a fairly easy mistake to make."