May
19
/ 2025
David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King's College London, was browsing Harvard Law School Library's online collections in December 2023 when he stumbled on something odd: a manuscript described as a 1327 edition of the Magna Carta, described as "somewhat rubbed and damp-stained." But as he paged through the online scans, something caught his eye—a realization that seized him: this was no standard reproduction. It was uncannily close to an original from 1300, the last officially sealed version of the Magna Carta by King Edward I. “What do I see before my eyes?" Carpenter recalled thinking. "For all the world it seemed to me an original of the 1300 Magna Carta,” reports the BBC. The Magna Carta: An
