A useful discovery, though the concept of an original is pretty vexed.
This is one of the official set of copies of Edward I's re-issue of a document first sent out in set of copies nearly a century earlier.
So it's several layers deep in copy-of-a-copy.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/15/harvards-unofficial-copy-of-magna-carta-is-actually-an-original-experts-say
This is one of the official set of copies of Edward I's re-issue of a document first sent out in set of copies nearly a century earlier.
So it's several layers deep in copy-of-a-copy.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/15/harvards-unofficial-copy-of-magna-carta-is-actually-an-original-experts-say
Comments
And some claim it only took on importance in the seventeenth century; this is wrong too.
It wasn't as important a symbol through the later Middle Ages as it would become, but it kept cropping up because it *was* a symbol.