Find Of The Week (5)

In 1946 London book dealers, Sweet & Maxwell, acquired what they thought was a copy of the Magna Carta, dated 1327, at auction at Sotheby’s for £42 and subsequently sold it to the Harvard Law School for $27.50. It has since been digitized but for all intents and purposes it has lain in relative obscurity, that is until David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London, started looking at it online in December 2023.

Carpenter thought that what he was looking at was not a copy but an original which had been misdated. A detailed comparison of text and other tests were carried out on the Harvard document, which confirmed that the “copy” was an original issue of the Magna Carta.

There are four copies of the 1215 issue and seven of the 1300 version, including Harvard’s original. One version sold at auction in 2007 fetched more than $21.3m  at Sotheby’s in New York.

It seems that Harvard does need the input of foreign students and academics after all.