Harvard Law School’s Magna Carta 'Copy' Authenticated as Original

Researchers have confirmed that what was believed to have been a copy of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is actually an original from 1300.

The authentication by Magna Carta experts from King’s College London and the University of East Anglia means the document is one of only seven surviving from King Edward I’s 1300 issue of Magna Carta.

The Harvard Law School Library bought the document known as ‘HLS MS 172’ in 1946 for $27.50. The auction catalogue described the manuscript as a “copy … made in 1327 … somewhat rubbed and damp-stained.” It had been purchased a month earlier by London bookdealers Sweet & Maxwell via Sotheby’s from a Royal Air Force war hero for £42.

Professor David Carpenter, Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London, was studying copies of Magna Carta when he saw the digitized version of HLS MS 172 on the Harvard Law School Library website and realized it might be an original and not an unofficial copy. He collaborated with Professor Nicholas Vincent, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, to investigate its provenance.

“This is a fantastic discovery,” said Professor Carpenter. “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 corner stone of freedoms past, present and yet to be won. The provenance of this document is just fantastic. Given where it is, given present problems over liberties, over the sense of constitutional tradition in America, you couldn’t invent a provenance that was more wonderful than this.”

Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law and Harvard Law School’s vice dean for Library and Information Services, added: “While there are deep benefits to the digital revolution, a physical artifact like this one offers a special and profound reminder of the ways in which the rule of law, and the societies and people it serves, has, in fits and starts, grown and strengthened over a span of centuries."

Tracing HLS MS 172’s journey to the U.S., Carpenter and Vincent believe the document could be a lost Magna Carta once issued to the former parliamentary borough of Appleby in Westmorland, England. The manuscript was sent to auction in 1945 by air vice-marshal Forster ‘Sammy’ Maynard CB. Forster Maynard inherited archives from Thomas and John Clarkson, leading campaigners against the slave trade from the 1780s onwards. In the early 1800s Clarkson retired to the English Lake District where he became a friend both of English poet William Wordsworth and of local landowner William Lowther, hereditary lord of the manor of Appleby.