To celebrate the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta—one of the most influential legal documents in the English-speaking world—Christie’s is offering a copy of the manuscript that made it onto the English statute books before becoming fundamental to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. The sale, which is part of the “Valuable Books and Manuscripts Including Cartography” auction, will take place in London on July 15, and the decorated manuscript on vellum (likely circa 1300) is estimated to sell for £50,000 to £80,000 ($78,000 to $120,000)
“The 1297 reissue of Magna Carta was the first time that the charter officially became part of the law of the land, enshrined within the written statutes of England,” Eugenio Donadoni, a specialist of medieval and renaissance manuscripts at Christie’s, tells* Architectural Digest.* “The manuscript we offer represents one of the earliest—if not the earliest—appearances of Magna Carta in a statute book, a watershed in the history of English law and legal training.”
