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Professor Nicholas Vincent
Magna Carta Project Principal Investigator |
Although I have spent a large
part of the last three years travelling and searching on behalf of this
project, I have thus far refrained from anything so vainglorious as a 'blog'. I
make an exception in the present instance only because this really is a story
worth telling.
On
8 December 2014, I gave a talk on Magna Carta at Queen's University Belfast, to
the Northern Ireland Human Rights Festival. This was in an admirable cause, and attracted a good audience. Afterwards, and following dinner with my
friends, the Flanagans and the Hannams, laid on by the organizers, I found
myself at midnight in Belfast, with time on my hands. I could have read, or switched on the
television. But television is the
insomniac's last resort. Instead, I thought
I would trawl through the online listings of the Kent Archives in
Maidstone. This might not be everybody's
first choice of late night hotel entertainment, but you must bear in mind that
I have spent a great deal of time over the past three years visiting archives
in England and France for the purposes of our Magna Carta Project, and that
Maidstone was next on my list. All told
in my career, I must have visited more than three hundred archives, and in each
case preparation has been crucial. Just
to turn up and hope to work through catalogues is to guarantee disappointment. The catalogues are often incomplete. They are rarely easy to handle. And there tend to be a lot of them. Instead, using my old notes, in some cases
dating back to the 1980s, and judicious searches of online catalogues, I have
generally found a lot of what we are looking for, well in advance of any visit. For the purposes of our project, we are
chasing anything to do with King John, and anything to do with Magna Carta,
from near-contemporary thirteenth-century copies of the charter, all the way
through to facsimiles given away by petrol stations in the 1970s.
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| Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone |
Maidstone
is an archive that I know relatively well. In the 1970s, I attended a specialist music school in Maidstone. I
taught from 1994 to 2003 at Christ Church Canterbury. As a result, I had visited the Maidstone
archive, if not frequently, then perhaps a dozen times. In recent years, the Maidstone office has
moved from County Hall to a new and larger site. There it accommodates archives formerly held
in the East Kent Record Office near Dover. These archives, I had not previously seen, in part because I supposed
them to contain nothing medieval that was not already known, in part because
they were housed some way outside Dover: like many academics, I have regularly
failed my driving test.
So
at about 1am Belfast time, I began typing in search terms to the Maidstone
online catalogue. I started with 'King
John' and then 'Magna Carta'. This produced very little, although in the longer
term, as I now know, it has helped to nail down a document of the 1760s, not of
immediate concern here, but crucial to our understanding of the circumstances
in which the 'Articles of the Barons' (an early draft of Magna Carta) came into
the possession of the British Museum, and hence of the British Library. At this stage, I might just have given
up. However, three decades of this sort
of thing have taught me that the best discoveries lurk deep within the
catalogues, and that fishing for them is a matter of patience and perhaps some
skill. I therefore went on a
chronological search, refining the search criteria to 'charter' within a date
range before 1350. This brought up about
thirty entries, some of them (as is inevitable) jejune, or already covered by
my own handwritten notes from the '80s and '90s. Almost the last of them was a reference to a 'Mutilated
fragment of a charter of Edward I ?1300 Forest Charter' belonging to the
borough of Sandwich.
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| Illustration from The Purloined Letter, by Edgar Allan Poe |
Now,
I have often found that the most interesting original records of Magna Carta,
as of much else, have gone unnoticed precisely because they are assumed either
to be copies rather than originals or because they travel with other less
famous documents. Cataloguers, assuming
that Magna Carta is much too important to have been overlooked, have very
frequently assumed that originals are copies, not from any physical evidence of
the fact, but simply because the idea of possessing an unknown Magna Carta has
appeared to the cataloguer to be as absurd as suddenly stumbling upon an
unknown play by Shakespeare or a unknown canvas by Vermeer. The most famous documents are often the documents
that, in their natural habitat, have been least studied. Edgar Allan Poe sums up this situation perfectly
in his story 'The Purloined Letter'. Poe's plot here turns on the fact that, if you wish to hide something
that everybody else assumes hidden, the best place to hide it is in plain view.
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| The Hereford Magna Carta of 1217 |
I
can claim, long before last December, to have found at least three Magna
Cartas. All were in plain view. None of them was 'unknown', in the sense that
they had all previously been listed, albeit in obscure places, either as Magna
Cartas or as 'copies' of Magna Carta. They were nonetheless 'unknown' in the sense that they were either
assumed to be 'copies' or 'duplicates' rather than originals (one of the three
1217 Magna Cartas, and the 1225 Magna Carta in the Bodleian Library in Oxford),
or were known locally but without any appreciation that local knowledge had not
come to national or international attention (the 1300 Magna Carta preserved in
the archives of the borough of Faversham). In one instance (the 1217 Magna Carta now in Hereford Cathedral), it had
been catalogued as a royal charter of liberties, but without realizing that
these liberties were those otherwise known as 'Magna Carta'. I vividly remember phoning Hereford
Cathedral, in 1989, and asking if I could go down there the following day to
see their Magna Carta (for there could be little doubt from the catalogue entry
that Hereford's 'Charter of liberties 1217' was a 1217 Magna Carta). I received a very dusty answer. 'We have no
Magna Carta', I was told, 'You must be thinking of Mappa Mundi!'. Ignoring this, and ordering up the document
by call number, I found myself, the following morning, greeted on Hereford
railway station by the canon librarian and the delightful cathedral archivist, Meryl
Jancey. Archivists and canon librarians
do not generally go to the railway to greet visiting postgraduate students. Short of playing me up Hereford High Street
with a brass band, they could not have expressed more joy. And inevitably, their first question was 'How
much is it worth?'.
Then
as now, I ducked the question. A
valuation, unless for insurance purposes, implies a temptation to sell, and
institutions such as cathedrals or towns are rarely well advised to sell their
medieval treasures. One might as well
sell the stones of Westminster Abbey or the White Horse of Uffington. Such things have been long enough in the
possession of a particular place to be immunized against all (or at least most)
commercial considerations. Those that
sell them (and I think here of a notorious case of a manuscript belonging to an
ancient and famous Hampshire school) have sometimes sold in haste only to
repent at leisure. In the meantime, I
suspect that it was as a result of telling the story of Hereford Cathedral's charter
that the next chapter of my involvement with Magna Carta came about. In 1999, my time as a visiting fellow of All
Souls College Oxford coincided with that of an eminent historian of the medieval
book, closely associated with the auction house Sotheby's (Christopher, I trust
that you prefer anonymity here). This
eminence, having heard me talk on the Hereford and other charters, recommended
me, a few years later, to act as expert advisor when Sotheby's came to auction
an original Magna Carta, of the 1297 issue, in sale at New York. As a result, in 2007, I compiled what was
intended as a definitive listing of all Magna Carta manuscripts, originals and
some copies, then known to survive. This
in itself was an interesting undertaking, since there had previously been only
two such lists, the first published by William Blackstone in 1759, the second
sixty years later.
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| Portrait of Sir William Blackstone (1723-80) |
In
1810, in the midst of wars between England and France, and no doubt spurred on
by the desire to out-do the Code Napoleon, the Record Commissioners appointed
by King George III published the first of a dozen folio volumes devoted to Statutes of the Realm. Here, they attempted to assemble definitive
texts of laws and statutes that until then had lain in considerable confusion
and neglect. As part of this exercise,
they travelled around England looking for old laws. Their findings were summarized at the
beginning of their first volume, which included not only Latin texts but
several beautifully engraved facsimiles (by James Basire) and a preliminary
listing of manuscript sources.
Blackstone,
who for the first time succeeded in properly distinguishing between the Magna
Carta of King John and its later issues, knew of seven originals issued between
1215 and 1300. The Record Commissioners
managed to find no less than twelve exemplars, at least one for each of the
successive issues of 1215, 1216, 1217, 1225, 1297 and 1300. In the process, they inevitably overlooked
things that in more recent times have resurfaced. Thus the Commissioners of 1810 knew that
there ought to be a 1215 Magna Carta at Salisbury. This they were unable to locate. It has since re-emerged and is now one of the
four iconic Magna Cartas of King John. They overlooked all but one of the four 1217 Magna Cartas, two of the
surviving 1225 charters, three of the issue of 1300 and another three of the
issue of 1297: all told, a further twelve originals. By the time that my census of Magna Carta
manuscripts was published in 2007, all but one of these had either come to
light or was newly unearthed as a result of the Sotheby's sale. Before 2007, the most exciting discoveries had
been those made in the 1930s at Bruton School in Somerset (a 1297 charter sold
in 1953 to the Australian government, and now in Canberra), and of another 1297
charter, at Deene Park in Northamptonshire, recovered in 1975 from the local
county record office by its owners, the Brudenell family, and in 1983 sold to
the American billionaire, Ross Perot. Mr
Perot deposited it for display in the National Archives in Washington. It was this Deene Park/Washington charter
that in December 2007 was sold at Sotheby's in New York for $21.3 million.
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The Forest Charter of 1225, British Library
Add. Ch. 24712 |
One
other detail before we pass on. Magna
Carta as issued in 1215 promised reform not only of the realm as a whole but of
the King's administration of those parts of England placed under 'forest law'
(i.e. set aside for the King's hunting, with severe consequences for land use
and the preservation of game). In 1217,
to answer this demand for reform, King Henry III not only issued a new version
of Magna Carta but, as a companion piece, an entirely distinct and smaller
charter known as the 'Forest Charter'. From
1217 onwards, the Forest Charter travelled in the company of Magna Carta,
rather as a pilot fish accompanies a shark. It was in order to distinguish between these two documents, bigger and
smaller, that as early as 1217 Magna Carta was first named 'Magna' ('the
great'). Thereafter, on each successive
reissue of Magna Carta, the Forest Charter was also reissued, in 1225, 1265,
1297 and 1300. The Record Commissioners,
in their search for original documents, were much less thorough in their
treatment of the Forest Charter than they were in their search for its more
famous sibling. Blackstone had found
only two original Forest Charters, both of them very late. The Record Commissioners knew of only
three. By contrast, we now know that at
least twelve survive. Some of these
turned up fortuitously at the time of my own search for new manuscripts in
2007. Others had resurfaced even more
recently.
So
it was, that around 4.30am in the morning of 9 December 2014, I decided that a
catalogue entry describing a Forest Charter of 1300, might well merit further
investigation. Even in the seven years
between 2007 (when I compiled my lists for Sotheby's) and 2014, when I stumbled
on the reference to the borough of Sandwich's
Forest Charter, I had found at least three further original Forest
Charters previously misidentified or ignored. The earliest of these, of 1225, came to light amongst the muniments of
Ely Cathedral, the most recent, of 1300, in the British Library. An original of 1300 at Oriel College seen by
Blackstone, reported missing in 2007, had re-emerged safe and sound.
Thanks
to modern technology, from Belfast to Maidstone is a mere click of the
mouse. At 4.39 Greenwich meantime on the
morning of 9 December last year, I sent an email (I have it in front of me) to
Dr Mark Bateson. I have known Mark for
nearly twenty years, first as an archivist at Canterbury Cathedral (where he
was one of those who devised the magnificent catalogue of Canterbury's medieval
charters), and more recently following his transfer to Maidstone. I told him that I had found the reference to
a Forest Charter , and as I noted in my email: 'If this really is the 1300
Sandwich copy of the forest charter, issued under the seal of Edward I, then it
is a major find. There are only a handful of such exemplifications still surviving
as originals. It would also fundamentally alter our understanding of the
way in which the charters of liberties were distributed for the later reissues
of Magna Carta. Is there any chance of your taking a sneak preview?'
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| Dr Mark Bateson with the Sandwich Magna Carta |
Mark
duly went to the shelves and looked at the document. Two days later, he wrote back to tell me that
the Sandwich Forest Charter did seem to be as described, although in a rather
battered state. He then added a
postscript that set more dramatic events in train. 'And by the way', he wrote, 'There is the
Sandwich copy of Edward’s 1300 confirmation of Magna Carta next to the Forest
Charter in the same volume. We didn’t know about that, so it’s a doubly
excellent discovery from our point of view'.
Within
a matter of minutes, he may have been surprised to receive my panicked reply
sent from Paris, drawing his attention to the fact that this was not just a
nice discovery but something really very special. For all of the fuss about the Magna Carta
sold in 2007, or the Magna Cartas which that sale had helped bring to light, no
entirely unknown original of the charter had been found since the 1970s, when
Mrs Brudenell came across the Deene Park Magna Carta, listed in a catalogue in
the county record office at Northampton.
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| The Sandwich Magna Carta of 1300 |
It
took me a week of other obligations before I could make my trip to Maidstone. As soon as the document was shown to me, on
the morning of 19 December, I knew that it was a Magna Carta. If you spend as much time as I have spent
over thirty years working on medieval charters, there is really no doubt when a
thing like this turns up. Forgery took
place on an industrial scale in the Middle Ages as now. But forgers in the thirteenth century were for
the most part interested in forging much earlier documents, not in
manufacturing things like false Magna Cartas. As for the idea that such a thing could have been made in more recent
times, once again there are all sorts of tell tale signs that help us to
distinguish the false from the authentic. Some of this is skill, some of it hard work, a lot of it what an
antiques dealer or art historian would consider standard connoisseurship. As any connoisseur will tell you, there is
also nothing quite to compare with the moment when you first see something,
previously hidden, that you immediately know to be the real article. It brings a smile to the lips and a sensation
of heightened reality, not dissimilar to that which you feel when you first see
your children walk.
From
this point onwards, it was plain that there would be media interest, and that
we should immediately alert the owners of the document (the borough of
Sandwich) and those other parties who might have a vested interest. To inform the town council of Sandwich, Mark
turned to a delightful person named Laura Fidler, Sandwich's town clerk. Laura, realizing that she had a drama on her
hands, managed to keep the news secret over Christmas. But whispers inevitably circulate. It was only a matter of time before the media
got hold of the story. This they did,
last Saturday, leading to a front page story in the Sunday Times, and a great deal of national and international
publicity thereafter. In all of this,
Laura Fidler was a magnificent defender of local interests. It was only when she realized that the story
was about to break that she authorized a press release, and allowed Mark and myself
to talk to the media. It was her
handling of all this that made the story such a positive one for Sandwich.
As
for the story itself, it provides a wonderful boost for Sandwich, for
Maidstone, for Kent and for the AHRC's Magna Carta Project. Various valuations have been placed upon the
Magna Carta, either on its own, or as part of a pair. I myself have been careful to avoid naming a figure. Both of the Sandwich charters are in poor
condition. Yet, even so, only three such
pairs survive from the 1300 issue: that at Sandwich, another in Oriel College
Oxford, and a third in the archives of Durham Cathedral. For the rest, there is a pair of 1225 Magna
Carta and Forest charter at Durham, and a pair of 1297, now split between a
Forest Charter in the British Library and a Magna Carta in Canberra
Australia. All of this places Sandwich
in a very select group. I count only
fourteen institutions, of which Sandwich is one, that possess original Magna
Cartas, and only three (Sandwich, Durham and Oriel College) that own matching
pairs of Magna Carta and Forest Charter.
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| 18th-century engraving of Faversham |
In
terms of its intrinsic significance, what is new about the Sandwich charter? To look at, it is far from lovely. It has suffered so badly from damp that a
large part of the middle of the text has rotted away. Parchment, which is to say sheep skin, supplies
ideal gnawing matter for rats and mice. Sandwich itself was burned by the French in 1457, and thereafter lost
its status as a major port, as both the Stour navigation and the channel
dividing Thanet from the mainland silted up. In due course, when we have properly collated what remains, we may find
that the Sandwich charter has subtle variations on the base text of the 1300
Magna Carta, significant in establishing the charter's definitive form. Much more importantly, the very fact that
Sandwich, like Faversham, possessed a Magna Carta, suggests that the 1300 charter
was more widely distributed than we have previously supposed. It apparently went to all of the Cinque
Ports. It went to every county. It may also have gone to cathedrals, major monasteries
and towns. In other words, whereas the
original Magna Carta, issued by King John in 1215, went to only a dozen or so
destinations, of which no less than four managed to preserve their charter, the
later reissues, including that of 1300, were much more widely distributed yet
have survived in much smaller proportion counting survivors against those
originally sent.
What
else does the story of the Sandwich Magna Carta teach us? Above, I would suggest, that the medieval
archives of England still have treasures waiting to be found. Many of these will be discovered in plain
view, sometimes assumed from their very notoriety too good to be true. I am fairly confident that there are other
original Magna Cartas still out there. We must be cautious. I myself
have been called upon, in the past, to authenticate documents believed by their
owners to be Magna Cartas, which on inspection have turned out to be nothing of
the sort. I particularly recall a visit
in New York, where I was shown what was supposed to be a Magna Carta. It was in fact a facsimile of the 1970s, distributed
in a rather splendid series of portfolios, collected by my generation of school
children, known as 'Jackdaw Packs'. The
makers of the Magna Carta 'Jackdaw Pack' had somehow got confused between Magna
Carta, and another related document, known as the 'Articles of the Barons'. As a result, it was the Articles, rather than
the charter, that was shown to me in New York. Even so, it had to be pointed out to this particular disappointed owner
that neither Magna Carta nor the Articles of the Barons is generally found, in
the thirteenth-century original, supplied with a typed English translation on
the document's back!
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Detail of portrait of James Brydges,
1st Duke of Chandos, by Michael Dahl |
Since
we are still hot on the trail, I do not intend here to give away every lead
that I have to pursue. Suffice it to
say, that at the sale of the (bankrupt) Duke of Chandos's manuscripts in 1747 a
Magna Carta was sold ('very ancient') for three shillings and sixpence. It has not since been traced. In 1810, the Record Commissioners reported
the survival of a 1300 Magna Carta in the borough archives of Appleby. No such original can now be found. A letter of 1873 in the archives of the
British Library claims knowledge of the whereabouts of an entirely unknown
Magna Carta, 'a heir loom of my family'. The fact that this correspondent was unable to spell (claiming ownership
of 'the Magna Carter of England') and wrote from what seems to have been a
London crossing sweeper's cottage may not incline us to suspend disbelief. Even so, in the world of medieval
manuscripts, even the most implausible of stories sometimes turn out to be
true.
Nicholas
Vincent
An
abridged version of this blog appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 February 2015. For a full and up to date census of Magna
Carta manuscripts, as well as a new history of the charter and its posterity,
see Nicholas Vincent's forthcoming Magna Carta: Making and Legacy (Bodleian Library Publications, Oxford 2015). For an illustrated history, see Magna Carta: The Foundations of Freedom,
ed. N. Vincent (Third Millennium Books, London 2015). For the charter of 1215, there is a splendid
new account by David Carpenter, Magna Carta (Penguin Books 2015). The findings of our AHRC project feed into the
British Library's forthcoming exhibition, 'Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy',
running from 13 March to 1 September 2015.
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