The Mystery of the Magna Carta

Magna Carta: uncovering a ‘totem of liberty’

Magna Carta, first issued by King John in 1215, is generally regarded as one of the cornerstones of 'liberty' around the world: the first attempt to place an English king, the sovereign power, under the rule of law.

The discovery and authentication of an original Magna Carta in the Harvard Law School Library by Professor David Carpenter (King's College London) and UEA's Professor Nicholas Vincent is therefore a groundbreaking achievement.

Prof Vincent is a leading expert in the history and provenance of Magna Carta: a document, literally 'the big charter', first issued in 1215 but reissued in revised form on several occasions thereafter, certainly in 1216, 1217, 1225, 1265, 1297 and 1300, each time as a series of upwards of thirty parchment sheets authenticated with the king's seal. As a result, there were originally over 200 of these documents in circulation, each of them an original Magna Carta. Time and its ravages have drastically reduced that number, so that today less than thirty are known to survive. One such, from 1297, fetched over $21 million at auction, at Sotheby's New York in 2007. It was his involvement as external expert for this sale that first alerted Vincent to the need for further investigation. Research by UEA's 'Magna Carta Project', established in collaboration with colleagues at other UK universities and libraries, has since led to the discovery of a 1300 original Magna Carta in the archives of the town of Sandwich, in Kent. But the Sandwich Magna Carta is by no means the last waiting to be found.

The discovery

In 2024, David Carpenter was trawling through online images of the collections of the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library when he made an incredible discovery: a document described there as a copy was, he suspected, not a copy but an original Magna Carta, making it one of seven surviving from King Edward I's issue of the charter in 1300. Carpenter immediately turned to his Magna Carta Project partner, Prof Vincent.

Together, through painstaking research and analysis of the text and document, involving cutting-edge tools such as spectral imaging, the two researchers proved its authenticity and traced its back story.

Discover the fascinating breakthrough:

The provenance

Unsurprisingly, a document this rare has a fascinating history of its own. Professor Vincent’s work suggests that its journey began in 1300 as the version of Magna Carta issued to the town of Appleby in Westmorland (an ancient northern county, now part of Cumbria). From there, in the early nineteenth century, it found its way

into the hands of Thomas and John Clarkson, leading figures in the campaign for the abolition of slavery. In 1945, for a mere £42, First World War flying ace, Air Vice-Marshal Forster ‘Sammy’ Maynard, heir to part of the Clarkson estate, sold the document at Sotheby’s, described there as no more than a late 'copy' of Magna Carta. The purchaser, a London-based book and manuscripts dealer, then sold it on to Harvard, the following year, for just $27.50.

Magna Carta has laid the foundations of constitutions and human rights around the world. It is, says Prof Vincent, “a totem of liberty, central to our sense of who we are: a freedom-loving, free-born people”.

Read more about Prof Vincent’s work and The Magna Carta Project below.

The mystery of the Magna Carta

Prof Nicholas Vincent

Magna Carta has for centuries been a focus of public attention, yet research in recent years has shown that there is so much more to learn about it. Having in 2007 catalogued and described what were then believed to be the twenty-four original versions of the document, surviving in archives in Great Britain, the USA and Australia, Professor Vincent set up a 'Magna Carta Project' at UEA, involving scholars and colleagues from several other UK universities. The intention was to dig deeper into the archives and the back story, in anticipation of the charter's upcoming 800th anniversary in 2015. Several of the project's discoveries earned international attention in 2015. These included a lost original Magna Carta now displayed in its own museum at Sandwich in Kent, and a letter, preserved in Lambeth Palace Library, that for the first time reveals the truly revolutionary extent of the baronial uprising in 1215. Working with colleagues in Oxford, Cambridge, London, Lincoln and Canterbury, Vincent also helped establish the precise circumstances in which the charter of 1215 was written: physically copied out not, as was previously supposed, by scribes working for the king, but in at least two instances at the initiative of the English bishops.

“To have found and identified the work of these scribes, 800 years after their writing, is a significant achievement, certainly equivalent to finding golden needles in a very large and messy haystack.”

Prof. Nicholas Vincent

The landmark discovery of who precisely copied out the 1215 Magna Carta came on the eve of its 800th anniversary in 2015. It reveals, for the first time, the true depth of the Church's involvement in placing the King under the rule of law. But for the willingness of the English bishops both to secure copies of the charter, and to

preserve them in their own cathedral archives, the king himself might have done little or nothing to advertise its terms.

Much of the research here was showcased in a major 2015 exhibition at the British Library, opened by the then Prince of Wales (now King Charles III). Together with ongoing work at UEA, undertaken in collaboration with curators at the British Library, the Bodleian Library and elsewhere, the Magna Carta Project has since gone on to make further discoveries, not least of the original 1300 Magna Carta now at Harvard Law Library, revealed in May 2025. Professor Vincent himself remains confident that there are further discoveries yet to make:

“Each and every time one of us visits an archive, or explores a previously uncatalogued collection, there is the potential for a really exciting discovery. Magna Carta is so well-known that, naturally, everyone assumes we can dig no deeper. In reality, and often hidden in plain sight, there are so many things that remain to be discovered, and so much more that we can still learn”

Prof. Nicholas Vincent

The Magna Carta Project has been made possible by a major grant from The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Its aim is to investigate the context, production and reception of Magna Carta. For further details here, visit the project website, including detailed commentaries, a series of archival discoveries, and Professor Vincent's day-by-day reconstruction of the events and rebellion of 1215 from which the charter first emerged.