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Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Harvard Bought a Copy of the Magna Carta for $27 and It Could Be Real
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Harvard Law School recently discovered a treasure that had been hiding in its library for decade. Two British academics say that a copy of the Magna Carta in the Ivy League university's possession is the real deal. The school bought the copy in 1946 from a London bookseller for $27.50 (approximately $485 when adjusted for inflation). But the scholars say this is an original manuscript dated to the year 1300, which would easily make this Antiques Roadshow-like find worth millions. The last known sale of an original Magna Carta manuscript took place in December 2007, when a 1297 edition was sold at auction by Sotheby's for $21.3 million. It had previously been owned by Texas billionaire Ross Perot and was purchased by David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group. That particular copy was one of only four known 1297 versions in private hands and is now on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Prior to Harvard's discovery, there were only 25 known surviving original copies of Magna Carta, with only three located outside of England. The manuscript sold in 2007 was the only one owned by a private individual and the only one located in the United States at that time. None were expected to be sold again—until now, a newly identified 1300 version has surfaced at Harvard, potentially altering that count. The Magna Carta, which means 'Great Charter' in Latin, was first signed in 1215 as was a declaration of rights forced on England's King John by his barons, establishing the principle that no one is above the law. Though many of its clauses were specific to medieval feudal disputes, it introduced ideas like due process and limited government that influenced later legal systems. Its legacy shaped the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, particularly in protections for individual liberty and the rule of law. The Magna Carta went through six iterations before the last original manuscripts were published in 1300. The manuscript in Harvard's possession was confirmed as authentic after spectral imaging revealed features matching six known 1300 originals, including identical text, dimensions, and distinctive handwriting details. 'I was trawling through all these online statute books trying to find unofficial copies of the Magna Carta…and I immediately thought, 'My God, this looks for all the world like an original of Edward I's confirmation of Magna Carta in 1300,' though, of course, appearances are deceptive,' David Carpenter, one of the two British academics behind the discovery and a professor of medieval history at King's College London, told The Guardian. While researching for a book from his home in southeast London, Professor Carpenter made the discovery when he came across a file in Harvard Law School's digital archives. Carpenter then brought in a colleague, Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, to help authenticate the manuscript. Vincent underscored in an interview with the New York Times that the document—which established that rulers must follow the law—reemerged just as Harvard University and other institutions of higher learning face intense pressure from the Trump administration. 'In this particular instance we are dealing with an institution that is under direct attack from the state itself,' Vincent told the NYT. 'So it's almost providential it has turned up where it has at this particular time.' You Might Also Like 12 Weekend Getaway Spas For Every Type of Occasion 13 Beauty Tools to Up Your At-Home Facial Game
The Age
16-05-2025
- General
- The Age
They paid $43 for a replica Magna Carta. Turned out, it's an original
Providential or not, the discovery happened largely by chance. Carpenter was at home in Blackheath, south-east London, ploughing his way through Harvard Law School's digital images as research for a book, when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 – the catalogue 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'.' Carpenter emailed 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?'' Vincent said. '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 that can enhance aspects of historical documents undetectable to the human eye. Comparing it with six previously known originals from 1300, the professors found the text matched, as did the dimensions – 489mm 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 digitalise things, to preserve things, to save things, to open things up for people like David Carpenter.' Watson said 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 Watson said she 'can't imagine' that it would be sold. 'In the United States, having things that are 700 years old is special,' added Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law and chair of the Harvard Law School library. Loading '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 US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights includes several provisions that are thought to descend from it. 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 purchased it in December 1945 from Sotheby's, the auctioneers. In the 1945 auction catalogue 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. Loading 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. 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 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, Vincent said the discovery at Harvard was timely. Loading Magna Carta, he said, placed 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 US, he added, 'so there is more of it in American state law than there is in the UK'. 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,' Vincent said.
Time of India
16-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
Harvard Law paid $27 for a copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It's an original
NYT photo Bought for $27.50 after WWII, 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 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 , professor of medieval history at King's College London. The manuscript's value is hard to estimate, although it is fair to say 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 was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million. Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at University of East Anglia, in eastern England, helped authenticate the text. He said 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 Trump govt. 'In this particular instance, we are dealing with an institution that is under direct attack from the state itself, so it's almost providential. ...' Providential or not, the discovery happened largely by chance. Carpenter was plowing his way through Harvard Law School's digital images when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 — catalogue 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... like an original.' He emailed Vincent, who was at work in a library in Brussels. 'David sent it with a message saying, 'What do you think that is?. .. '' said Vincent. 'I wrote back within seconds, saying, 'You and I both know what that is!'' They were able to confirm its authenticity after Harvard photographed it under ultraviolet light and 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, they found the text and dimensions matched. The handwriting also tallied. Magna Carta — 'Great Charter' in Latin — has been used to justify many different causes over the centuries, sometimes on shaky historical ground. First issued in 1215, the document put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England. It influenced the US Constitution. Harvard bought its version from a London book dealer, which had purchased it in Dec 1945 from Sotheby's.
Boston Globe
15-05-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Harvard's $27.50 ‘copy' of Magna Carta revealed to be original worth millions
Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' Related : 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. Advertisement '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.' Advertisement 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
The Age
15-05-2025
- Science
- The Age
They paid $43 for a replica of the Magna Carta. Turned out, it's an original
Providential or not, the discovery happened largely by chance. Carpenter was at home in Blackheath, south-east London, ploughing his way through Harvard Law School's digital images as research for a book, when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 – the catalogue 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'.' Carpenter emailed 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?'' Vincent said. '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 that 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 – 489mm 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 digitalise things, to preserve things, to save things, to open things up for people like David Carpenter.' Watson said 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 Watson said she 'can't imagine' that it would be sold. 'In the United States, having things that are 700 years old is special,' added Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law and chair of the Harvard Law School library. Loading '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 US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights includes several provisions that are thought to descend from it. 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 purchased it in December 1945 from Sotheby's, the auctioneers. In the 1945 auction catalogue it was listed as a copy and with the wrong date (1327) and was sold for 42 pounds – 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. Loading 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. 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 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, Vincent said the discovery at Harvard was timely. Magna Carta, he said, placed 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 US, he added, 'so there is more of it in American state law than there is in the UK'. 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,' Vincent said. Both he and Carpenter plan to visit Harvard Law School next month to see and touch the document for the first time, a moment that Vincent predicted would be 'emotional.
