Has Harvard actually found the Magna Carta?
Imagine you bring along to the Antiques Roadshow a scuffed piece of parchment covered in writing in Latin so faded that you find it impossible to decipher the letters. You confess that your grandparents paid £20 for it at an auction way back in 1946. It is then revealed, at that awkward moment when members of the public are told that their prized chipped mug from the coronation of George VI is only worth £5, that your parchment is actually a copy of Magna Carta worth £16,000,000.
Scuffed items sometimes do well on that programme. Rolex watches are a case in point, reaching into the tens of thousands. They have in a sense become a reserve currency for the very rich, without being particularly elegant in appearance and despite (even because of) all the knocks and bruises they have received. Then there was a poverty-stricken man living in a shack in California who was inspired by the American equivalent of Antiques Roadshow to take a filthy Navajo blanket his mother thought might fetch ten dollars to an auction house, which sold it for $1,500,000. A Chinese bowl from around AD 1000, bought at an American garage sale for $3, fetched $2,200,000 in the sale rooms. The only one like it is in the British Museum.
This time, though, the proud owner of a text of Magna Carta is the Law School at Harvard University, by far the richest university in the world, even after President Trump has taken away a great slice of its research funding. Even so, Harvard probably will not need to sell it. And in any case – this is where things turn awkward – it isn't actually an original from 1215, but a copy made after its re-issue in 1300, apparently in 1327.
It was most probably sent all the way to a remote corner of Westmorland, its former county town of Appleby, which for centuries had the right to send two members to the House of Commons. Indeed, one of the features that led two eminent scholars, David Carpenter at King's College London and Nicholas Vincent at the University of East Anglia, to identify it was that it begins with a large E, which stands not for King John, obviously enough, but for King Edward I who had re-issued the charter amid political ructions less acute than those that tore England apart nearly a century earlier under King John.This document survived among the papers of the great abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, whose campaigns against the slave trade have lately achieved the ultimate accolade of being sneered at in a tendentious exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge about the abolition of the slave trade with the rousing title Rise Up! Resistance, Revolution, Abolition.
Clarkson would have seen Magna Carta as support for his entirely admirable convictions. However, most of the liberties of which Magna Carta speaks are not quite what we think of as liberties, and only four clauses remain on the Statute Book to this day, but they are fundamental to our principles of government. The most memorable is 'to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.' Even in our own day we may wonder whether these clauses have only been honoured in the breach.
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