Edition of Magna Carta worth £10m discovered in Kent council archives
An edition of the Magna Carta worth up to £10m has been discovered belonging to the Kent town of Sandwich.
The 1300 copy of the historic document means there are now 24 known editions in the world.
The Press Association reports that the document, a third of which is ripped, was discovered in the Maidstone archives but belongs to Sandwich.
The document was authenticated by Professor Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia, an expert on the subject and member of the Magna Carta project.
Vincent said that the discovery lent weight to the theory that there were more issues of the document than previously thought:
It must have been much more widely distributed than previously thought because if Sandwich had one…the chances are it went out to a lot of other towns.And it is very likely that there are one or two out there somewhere that no one has spotted yet.
The Magna Carta was created in 1215 under King John, who agreed to a draft written by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It established the principle of rule of law and equality before law. There are just four known 1215 editions.
The parchment discovered in Maidstone is a version of the charter issued by Edward 1 in 1300.
In 2008. a 1297 edition sold for roughly £14m in a public auction at Sotheby’s in New York.