10 Facts You Should Know About the Magna Carta
10. There is no single “original” copy of the document
Multiple copies of the first Magna Carta were distributed to individual English county courts during the summer of 1215. Today four of those copies survive; the British Library holds two, and the other two are in the collections of the cathedrals at Salisbury and Lincoln. At the beginning of World War II Winston Churchill tried to force Lincoln Cathedral to donate its original Magna Carta to the United States, where it had been on display, in hopes that such a gift would create support for an alliance with Great Britain. Such a strong-armed donation would, of course, have run contrary to the property rights enshrined in the document itself. In the end, the cathedral’s Magna Carta spent the war under guard at Fort Knox, but was returned to England after the war.
A handful of other Magna Cartas are versions issued between 1225 and 1297, when the charter officially entered the English statue books. In 2007, a 1297 Magna Carta sold at auction for $21.3 million, the most ever paid for a single page of text.
