Libraries Acquire Medieval Manuscript Including 1300 Magna Carta Regrant Text

Why This Manuscript

Manuscripts like this one were traditionally utilitarian. However, based on the extensive decorative elements, known as illuminations, and on where it was most likely made, the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of St Peter in York, someone of wealth probably commissioned it for personal use. 

The pages feature large decorative initials with gold leaf at the beginning of each statute, and a painting of King Edward I opens the Magna Carta section. The King's illustration is particularly intriguing, since only the crown could grant permission to portray the monarch. That restriction helps date the manuscript's creation from 1300, the year King Edward I regranted the charter, to his death in 1307.

King John confirmed the first version of Magna Carta in 1215 to appease rebel barons. Historians consider Magna Carta a groundbreaking agreement between a monarch and the baronage because it was often regarded as a “royal concession to the rights of subjects,” says Carl Estabrook, associate professor of history at Dartmouth, who viewed the manuscript at Rauner Library in August.

Estabrook stresses that Magna Carta benefited the already wealthy landed gentry, “a tiny minority who themselves wielded largely unchecked social, legal, and economic power.” While the baronage expected Magna Carta to be permanent, it wasn’t entirely stable. In practice, they had to reconfirm its legitimacy with subsequent monarchs. 

“Dartmouth’s own history turns on a charter and on the constitutional limits of a state’s power to alter it,” says Provost Santiago Schnell. “This early 14th-century legal compendium allows students to encounter Magna Carta within the legal culture that copied, organized, and used it. With Dartmouth’s 1769 charter and a newly gifted first edition of The Federalist in Rauner Library, students can follow an argument about lawful government and the limits of power across nearly five centuries in a single afternoon.”