[This version from] 1300 is the best, final Magna Carta.
Professor David Carpenter
26 June 2025
Professor Carpenter visits original Magna Carta at Harvard Law conference after discovery
Professor David Carpenter visits Harvard Law School where the newly discovered Magna Carta is housed.
Experts joined a conference at Harvard Law School where King's Professor David Carpenter and Professor Nicholas Vincent, UEA celebrated the discovery of an exceedingly rare, original Magna Carta in the Harvard Law School Library’s collection and discussed its significance to legal history and the world.
Purchased for £42 in 1946 and initially thought to be a copy, HLS MS 172 is instead a genuine issue from 1300, “the final, definitive, authoritative Magna Carta, and … what is on the statute book of the United Kingdom,” said David Carpenter, Professor of medieval history.
David Carpenter and Nicholas Vincent spoke on a panel with two Harvard Law scholars, debating the discovery’s impact on Harvard, the law, and the polity. What does it mean to be an “original” Magna Carta? What was this “Great Charter”? And is it even relevant today?
Considered a key step in the evolution of human rights against oppressive rulers, Magna Carta has formed the basis of constitutions around the world. It was influential in the founding of the United States, from the Declaration of Independence to the framing of the U.S. Constitution and the subsequent adoption of the Bill of Rights.
The Harvard Law School Library bought the document known as ‘HLS MS 172’ in 1946 for a sum of $27.50, according to the library’s accession register. The auction catalogue described the manuscript as a “copy…made in 1327…somewhat rubbed and damp-stained”. It had been purchased a month or so earlier by the London bookdealers Sweet & Maxwell, via Sotheby's, from an RAF war hero for a mere £42. Posted on the Harvard Law Library website in 2014, Professor Carpenter found the digitalised version when looking through HLS's online archive.
Seeing at last the Magna Carta in the flesh, in the heart of the Harvard Law School, was a moving and unforgettable experience. Although the images sent us made the text familiar, they gave no impression of just how large and imposing the Charter is. One felt all the more powerfully how right that one of the world’s great centres of legal studies should have an original of the world’s most famous document asserting the pre-eminence of the rule of law. I hope it will inspire those studying law at Harvard for generations to come.
Professor David Carpenter
Professor Carpenter said he believed there was something of value — beyond money — in possessing an original. The manuscript is “very, very evocative and powerful,” he said. “Although I can look at all your lovely copies in the statute books, I don’t think any of them have got the emotive power or the authority of an actual original, because they all derive from the original.”
We’ve got a document that belonged to one of the key figures in the antislavery campaign that then belonged to a man who defended Malta against the powers of fascism in the Second World War. What better provenance could you possibly invent?
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Leah Prescott, former associate director for collections at HLS said that Harvard’s work with HLS MS 172 will endure, as the library continues to protect and make the manuscript available for future generations.
“We digitize so that we can see what is there, but we preserve so that we can believe what it is that we are seeing,” she said.
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Professor of Medieval History