A Historian Pulled an Old Document Out of Storage—and Discovered an Original Magna Carta

Yahoo

20-05-2025

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Here's what you'll learn in this story:
Two British scholars discovered that an innocuous Harvard Law School Library document was actually an original 1300 copy of the Magna Carta.
Believed to be a copy from 1327 when it was purchased for $27.50 from a London bookseller in 1946, the document had been sitting in the university library for decades.
Scholars traced the provenance, and now believe it was one of about 30 copies sent out by King Edward I to the Appleby borough.
An original version of the Magna Carta—considered one of the most important documents in all of history—was sitting (unbeknownst to anyone) within the Harvard Law School Library. Believed for decades to be a copy, a pair of British scholars recently uncovered that it is, in fact, the real deal.
The team came across the document—which had been labled 'HLS MS 172'—while doing other research. Now, they believe this copy to be one of the last Magna Carta originals to have ever been created.
'My reaction was one of amazement and, in a way, awe that I should have managed to find a previously unknown Magna Carta,' David Carpenter, professor of medieval history at King's College London, told the Associated Press. 'First, I'd found one of the most rare documents and most significant documents in world constitutional history. But secondly, of course, it was astonishment that Harvard had been sitting on it for all these years without realizing what it was.'
Harvard had purchased what was believed to have been a copy of the Magna Carta created in 1327 from London bookseller Sweet & Maxwell for $27.50 in 1946. It carried out an inconspicuous existence in the library since then, until Carpenter took notice of it in December of 2023 and sent images to Nicholas Vincent—a medieval history professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain—asking what he thought. Upon taking a look at the document, Vincent agreed that this was more than a mere copy. 'You know jolly well what that is,' Carpenter said Vincent told him, according to Harvard Magazine. 'It's clearly an original. It's not a copy.'
Vincent let Harvard know what they had, but their response was 'lukewarm,' at best. 'I think they may have thought I was a lunatic, actually,' he said.
Still, he and Carpenter worked with the library to authenticate the work, using ultraviolet light and spectral imaging to reveal faded writing. The duo compared it to the six other known original copies from 1300 to confirm word-for-word matches in the writing and identical handwriting styles—right down to elongated letters.
The handwriting and 19-by-19-inch size fit with the other 1300 Magna Cartas, and even the text stated it was from the '28th year of Edward's reign,' linking it directly to 1300.
'It was quite nerve-wracking,' Carpenter said about the authentication process, 'but the merciful thing is, at the end, Harvard Law School passed the exam with flying colors.'
The Magna Carta was first issued in 1215—a powerful document that placed a rule of law on English monarchs. That original document, signed by King John, established due process and habeas corpus, and has served as the basis for some of the world's most foundational documents, including the U.S. Constitution.
The Magna Carta was reissued five times—known as 'confirmations'—between 1215 and the final confirmation in 1300. Carpenter said that well over 30 were created in 1300 by King Edward I and sent across the country with his seal, but only six were thought to have survived. The 1300 Magna Carta has small differences from other versions, and the changes are found in every 1300 original, Carpenter said, which was helpful when comparing the Harvard document to the others.
'It's one of the world's most valuable documents,' Carpenter said. And that's both historically and monetarily, as a 1297 version sold in 2007 for a whopping $21.3 million.
The scholars wanted to establish how a document sold in a London bookshop in the 1940s could trace back to 1300. The pair was able to find that a World War I flying ace—Air Vice-Marshal Forster Sammy Maynard, CB—sold the document via a Sotheby's auction in 1945. London bookseller Sweet & Maxwell bought the document, and then sold it to the Harvard Law School Library in 1946.
Vincent said that Maynard's grandson told him that the pilot had inherited historical documents from Thomas and John Clarkson—leaders of a campaign against the British slave trade. Clarkson was acquainted with William Lowther, the hereditary lord of the manor of Appleby, which was one of the places a 1300 confirmation was sent. It was known to still be there in 1762, making this likely the same document.
'There's a chain of connection there, as it were, a smoking gun,' Vincent said, 'but there isn't any clear proof as yet that this is the Appleby Magna Carta. But it seems to me very likely that it is.'
What was 'bought for peanuts in 1946' and has sat unceremoniously within the Boston institution will now get its due. Harvard plans to keep its Magna Carta, but now, they know it's worth.
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