Magna Carta

Translated from the Latin, “Magna Carta” means “Great Charter,” and great it is as the forerunner of constitutional law and a statement for the rights and freedoms of all people in a free society.

In original form, Magna Carta was drafted by self-interested barons who had in desperate mind their own protection from King John. King John was characterized by a statesman leader but also chronicler of a later time, Winston Churchill, as ruthless and cruel, “with a cold, inhuman intelligence.” The barons were only trying to protect their own rights, not then the rights of all, but they planted the seed anyway for what has become our own Constitution and that of our individual states. Churchill spoke to the turmoil of the time, 1215 AD, in “A History of the English-speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain, “ Book II in V. 1 of 4 (1956). Chapter 15 is about the making of Magna Carta.

While the book has a little about technology as it relates to the making of war, and little about the commoner who is fodder to the sword, it has much about power and bloodletting at the top, as was so for nearly all the first fifteen centuries AD. Was the War of the Roses only 30 years long? It hardly stands apart. King John hardly stands apart, nor many other kings and aspirants to be king. Magna Carta stands apart.

Churchill’s famous quip is to the point. “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

One well known example of the power of Magna Carta’s language: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” One of the underlying principles by which our own Constitution insists that we live, under law.

As reported in the New York Times by Stephen Castle on May 15, 2025, “Harvard Paid $27 for a Copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It’s an Original.” It was purchased after World War II and thought to be just a copy. There it sat in the Library of Harvard Law School until 2023 when David Carpenter, Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London, discovered it while doing academic research for a book he was planning.

It was not very legible, but modern technology using ultraviolet radiation and spectral imaging helped make it possible to confirm that this document joins six other originals known to exist from about 1300 AD. What a remarkable story of preservation of a precious historical record and of modern technology! It is such stories that help to remind us how important it is to understand our own history, pointedly in the framing of constitutional law, and to build scientific and technological competence. In so many ways that value can be shown and/or quantified, this being just one.

The case could not have been articulated better than said to the Times by Amanda Watson, Assistant Dean at Harvard Law School’s Library: “It’s the best sort of thing that can happen to a librarian. This is our daily work to digitalize things, to preserve things, to save things, to open things up for people like David Carpenter.”