The Magna Carta Project

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Magna Carta is one of the most famous documents in history, celebrated throughout the English-speaking world. It is widely seen as the foundation stone of the British constitutional tradition in which kings and law makers are themselves subjected to the rigours of the law. And yet, there is a great deal about Magna Carta that remains unknown. There has been no proper commentary on the original 1215 issue of Magna Carta in the past hundred years, and there has never been a proper commentary on the 1225 reissue of the charter that became the standard version, parts of it still on the Statute Book today. Despite the fact that all four of the original versions of Magna Carta preserved from the issue of 1215 have been granted UNESCO World Heritage status, there has never been a proper edition noticing all of the differences between these documents. The subsequent reissues of the charter, including the definitive version of 1225, have been left unedited and to a large extent unstudied since 1805. No-one is entirely sure of the relation between these texts, or indeed of how many reissues, or how many surviving copies there are from the first century of Magna Carta. Since the 1830s, there has been no systematic search for documentary evidences for King John. As a result, historians today have only a warped and incomplete understanding of large parts of John's reign, crucial for the making of Magna Carta. Because no work has been undertaken on the handwriting of John's original letters and charters, several hundred of which survive in archives scattered across Britain, Ireland and France, we are unable to say who wrote Magna Carta or whether the four surviving originals were written by royal or by other scribes. The present project, which combines input from four universities and the principal modern authorities on the subject, is intended to appeal both to scholars and to a more general public. It will fill many gaps in our knowledge of Magna Carta in time for the forthcoming 800th anniversary of the charter to be celebrated in 2015. The project's website, intended to become the first port of call for anyone interested in Magna Carta, will supply full commentaries and English translations of all of the various versions of the document. It will supply photographs and summaries not only of all of the surviving Magna Cartas but of several hundred related documents. It will explain the charter's significance, both in scholarly and in popular terms. It will supply access to a large body of documentary evidence, until now locked away in the archives, crucial for our understanding of the writing, marking, meaning and posterity of Magna Carta. It will be supplied with blogs, monthly features and postings intended both to broadcast these new discoveries and to satisfy public interest. Its result will be fed into a programme directed to schools and to public understanding as well as to scholars. It will assist in the mounting of a major Exhibition at the British Library in the anniversary year, 2015, accompanied by an international conference open to the general public, the media and to scholars. The conference will itself further disseminate the project's findings. Amongst these, besides the first proper edition of Magna Carta ever presented in all its guises, the first ever full commentary on the standard 1225 text of Magna Carta, and the first commentary since 1914 on the original version issued by King John, it is hoped that by 2015 we can not only explain 'Who wrote Magna Carta', but the context and the circumstances in which this most significant of constitutional documents was brought to birth.