Harvard's $27.50 ‘copy' of Magna Carta revealed to be original worth millions

Boston Globe

15-05-2025

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Carpenter, professor of medieval history at King's College London, immediately emailed his colleague, Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, to try to confirm his suspicions about the document, asking, ''What do you think that is?''
Within a minute, Vincent shot back a reply: 'You and I both know what that is!'
'There are thousands of copies of Magna Carta,' Vincent said. 'They all betray themselves in one way or another … This one doesn't.'
Magna Carta — Latin for 'Great Charter' — was first sealed by King John in 1215 under pressure from rebellious barons to place limits on royal authority. But the king quickly renounced it, and the pope annulled it within weeks.
'That document died,' Vincent said.
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In the years that followed, John's successors reissued revised versions to restore political order in 1216, 1217, 1225, 1297, and finally in 1300 — the version now confirmed in
Over time, it came to be seen 'as the foundation of liberty under the Anglo-American tradition of law,' Vincent said.
'The key point is that you have a right to a fair trial — that you can't just be arbitrarily acted against by some tyrannical ruler," he said.
Legal scholars say that principle — that all are protected by, and bound to, the law, even the sovereign — would go on to influence many modern constitutional democracies, including the legal framework of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights
Confirming the document's authenticity involved a detailed comparison of its text, dimensions, and handwriting against known originals.
'The wording in this one is exactly as it should be,' Vincent said. 'Words aren't missing, inverted, or varied — that's a telltale sign of a copy. This is an original Magna Carta.'
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Amanda Watson, assistant dean of the Harvard Law School Library, said her team worked closely with the scholars to provide imaging and scans.
'They needed different scans. They wanted to do some ultraviolet scans and we made all that happen,' she said.
The confirmation of Harvard's Magna Carta as an original makes it one of just three of the 25 known originals located outside the United Kingdom, alongside originals held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia.
A 1297 Magna Carta sold at auction in 2007 for $21.3 million, but Watson said a sale is unlikely.
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'We aren't in the practice of selling our museum and library collections,' she said.
The running theory about how the document reached Harvard — its 'provenance,' in professional parlance — is almost more remarkable than its identification, Vincent said.
Carpenter and Vincent traced the document's path back to Air Vice-Marshal Forster Maynard, a British World War I flying ace who also helped defend Malta from fascist Italy in the early days of World War II. In 1945, shortly after the war's end, Maynard sold the manuscript to a London dealer for £42. That dealer, believing it to be a copy, sold it to Harvard Law School for $27.50 (about $500 today).
'His [Maynard's] grandson, Peter, explained to me that his grandfather had inherited the papers of Thomas and John Clarkson,' Vincent said, 'the great leaders of the abolition movement against slavery in Britain ... Thomas Clarkson went on to carry that crusade to America, one of his last meetings was with Frederick Douglass' family.'
The researchers believe the manuscript was originally held by the Lowther family, a powerful landowning dynasty in northern England that controlled the borough of Appleby, which is known to have possessed a 1300 Magna Carta as late as the 1760s. Vincent said the Clarksons were close with the Lowthers and that the document likely passed into their hands sometime in the 18th century, before eventually being inherited by Maynard.
The connection to historical anti-slavery and anti-fascist struggles resonates with the Magna Carta's foundational role in the development of Western constitutional democracy — and, Vincent said, with the current political moment.
'It should turn up at a decisive moment where those sorts of liberties are in question,' he said. 'What it tells us above all is that the governors and the government must obey the law.'
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Elizabeth Kamali, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in medieval English law, said she believes the timing of the discovery could lend it special meaning, with many of today's political conflicts — regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum — centered on differing interpretations of due process and the rule of law.
'The present political situation in the United States is bound to have an effect on how individuals interpret this particular news,' she said. 'The idea that the king is subject to law — that those in power are bound by the law — is one of the enduring messages of Magna Carta.'
Nathan Metcalf can be reached at