Harvard Bought This Stained Copy of the Magna Carta for $27.50. It Turned Out to Be an Original
Issued by Edward I in 1300, this version of the historic text is one of only seven known surviving copies. It’s been hiding in plain sight in Harvard Law School’s library since 1946
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In 1946, the library of Harvard Law School purchased a tattered document for $27.50. Records described it as a “rubbed and damp-stained” copy of the Magna Carta, Britain’s 1215 charter that limited the monarch’s authority and protected individual rights.
Now, scholars have discovered that this “copy”—known as “HLS MS 172”—is actually a rare version of the Magna Carta reissued by Edward I in 1300. According to a statement from Harvard Law School, the newly identified document is one of only seven known surviving copies of this reissue.
David Carpenter, a medieval historian at King’s College London, was browsing Harvard’s digital archive when he came across an image of HLS MS 172. As he recalls in a video, he thought it looked like a “1300 original.” Carpenter contacted Nicholas Vincent, a medieval historian at the University of East Anglia, for a second opinion.
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“The instant I saw it, I knew! Everything about the document looked right,” Vincent tells the Washington Post’s William Booth. “The layout, the text, the handwriting and the large capital E for Edwardus.”
The Magna Carta—Latin for “great charter”—was written in 1215 by a group of English barons who aimed to “protect their rights and property” against the “tyrannical” King John, per the National Archives. The charter would later serve as a profound influence on the United States’ founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Four known copies of that original issue survive today.
Several versions of the document emerged in the years that followed. In the video, Carpenter explains that the “definitive version” of the Magna Carta was released in 1225 and then reissued on several occasions. Edward’s 1300 reissue was the “last time that a king of England actually confirmed the 1225 Magna Carta,” he adds.
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At the two historians’ request, experts at Harvard Law Library scanned the document using spectral and ultraviolet imaging, per Harvard Law Today’s Colleen Walsh. These imaging techniques can help determine a document’s age by revealing new information about the composition of the paper and ink.
“It’s the best sort of thing that can happen to a librarian,” Amanda Watson, assistant dean of library and information services, tells the New York Times’ Stephen Castle. “This is our daily work to digitalize things, to preserve things, to save things, to open things up for people like David Carpenter.”
The images allowed Carpenter and Vincent to compare the document “word-for-word” against other originals from 1300, as the Associated Press’ Michael Casey reports.
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These 1300 originals are “different from the previous versions in a whole series of small ways, and the changes are found in every single one,” Carpenter tells the AP, adding that HLS MS 172 passed the authentication tests “with flying colors.”
How did an original 1300 Magna Carta end up at Harvard? In 1945, a Royal Air Force veteran, who had inherited the document, sold it at a Sotheby’s auction, where it was incorrectly dated to 1327. The London book dealer Sweet & Maxwell purchased it for £42. About a month later, the Harvard Law School Library bought the document for $27.50 (about $450 today). These days, that price tag would probably be far higher. In 2007, a 1297 copy sold for $21.3 million.
“This is a fantastic discovery,” says Carpenter in the statement. “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.”
