Magna Carta Owned By Harvard Appears To Be an Original

BY JOSEPH PISANI

For 80 years, Harvard Law School believed the Magna Carta it had bought for $27.50 was a reproduction.

Now, British researchers think the document is genuine— one of just a few still in existence.

The Magna Carta was originally written in 1215 and agreed on by King John of England. It was periodically reissued by monarchs over the next century. The one that Harvard has appears to date to 1300, during the reign of Edward I.

A seminal document in legal history, the Magna Carta asserts that the king is subject to the law, and recognizes limits in his power. It has influenced constitutions globally, including the U.S.’s founding documents.

The document, which spent decades in a vault, is now being secured in an undisclosed location, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor and chair of its library. He declined to say how much the school believes the document is now worth.

Zittrain said the artifact “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.”

The journey of Harvard’s Magna Carta from reproduction to real deal started with some internet sleuthing in late 2023.

David Carpenter, a medieval history professor at King’s College London, was doing research about Magna Carta copies for a book.

The picture on Harvard Law School’s website caught his eye. It had a capital “E” for “Edwardus” in the first line and was dated 1300.

“They seemed to have no awareness of what they had,” Carpenter said. With the school’s version, there are 25 known Magna Cartas, most of them in the U.K., he said.

In the spring of 2024, Harvard agreed to do special imaging of the document to verify if it was real, Carpenter said. Harvard has also had its experts look over the work by Carpenter and a second expert, Nicholas Vincent.

The school had never questioned the document’s origins because it was told it was a copy when it purchased it, Zittrain said.

The last reported sale of a Magna Carta was in 2007. David Rubenstein, a co-founder of Carlyle Group, paid $21.3 million at an auction for the 1297 version previously owned by billionaire Ross Perot. It is on display at the National Archives in Washington.