Magna Carta, 1297 (the Perot-Rubenstein copy)

One of only four surviving originals of the 1297 confirmation of Magna Carta, the version of the charter that Edward I entered onto England's official Statute Rolls and that has functioned as living law, not merely historical relic, ever since. It is the only 1297 original ever to have left England, the only one ever in private hands, and - since Ross Perot bought it in 1983-84 - the only one in the United States.

Rediscovered among the Brudenell family papers at Deene Park in the 1970s, it was bought by Perot for 1.5 million US dollars and lent to the National Archives from 1985. The Perot Foundation sold it at Sotheby's on 18 December 2007 for 21.3 million dollars to David M. Rubenstein, who immediately returned it to the National Archives on permanent loan and later gave 13.5 million dollars toward the gallery that now houses it.

This is not the 1215 Magna Carta of popular memory - a different, more famous, and legally superseded text. It is the 1297 confirmation, the version that entered statute law and that historians identify as the specific text that reached the framers of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Not the famous one

This is the single fact a reader most needs before anything else: this is not the 1215 Magna Carta. The 1215 charter, sealed by King John at Runnymede, is the founding moment of legend - the barons, the meadow, the king forced to yield. It was annulled by the Pope within weeks and reissued, amended, in 1216, 1217 and 1225. Four exemplifications of the 1215 text survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Cathedral, one at Salisbury Cathedral. None of them is this document, and none of them is for sale or in the United States.

This object is a confirmation issued by Edward I, John's grandson, on 12 October 1297 - eighty-two years after Runnymede. It re-grants the substance of the 1225 charter, but its legal act is different and, for American constitutional history, arguably more important: this is the version Edward formally entered onto England's Statute Rolls, converting Magna Carta from a one-off royal concession into a standing piece of the law of the land. Seventeen originals of Magna Carta survive across all reissues between 1215 and 1300. Only four are of this 1297 confirmation, and this is one of them.

What the parchment is

Physically it is a single sheet of parchment, roughly 370 by 420 millimetres with a 32 millimetre fold at the foot, ruled with faint vertical plumb lines and written in 68 lines of a neat, disciplined chancery hand - the professional script of Edward's writing office, not a scribe working alone on commission. Margins are narrow and even: 10 millimetres on the left, 28 at the top, 15 on the right. Sotheby's, cataloguing it in 2007, called its condition generally good to excellent and legible throughout, noting rubbing, damp staining and soiling in places, and repairs with backing where the parchment had weakened.

Edward's small seal hangs from a parchment tag, natural wax, about 22 millimetres wide, showing the king enthroned with sceptres. It is partially damaged and has been repaired. The seal is the instrument's authority made physical: without it, the document is a copy; with it, even a small and damaged example, it is an original act of the crown.

A confirmation, not a concession

Edward I did not reissue Magna Carta in 1297 out of reforming zeal. He needed money and cooperation for war in Flanders, and English barons and clergy had leverage: they would grant taxation if the king would confirm the charters. The result, the Confirmatio Cartarum, reissued both Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest and, critically, ordered that both be entered onto the official Statute Rolls and read publicly twice a year in every cathedral. This exemplar carries physical evidence of exactly that distribution process: a near-contemporary docket reading 'tradatur Rogero Hodelyn de Neuport', recording that this specific copy was formally handed over for proclamation to an identified individual, within an identified county. Sotheby's described this as a unique surviving detail among the 1297 exemplifications sent out that year.

Because the king was in Flanders when the confirmation was sealed, the charter was issued and authenticated in his name by the government left behind in England - a reminder that a royal instrument is an institutional act, produced by a chancery, not a personal signature.

Why 1297, not 1215, reached Philadelphia

The line most American accounts draw from Magna Carta to the Constitution and Bill of Rights - due process, no punishment without lawful judgment, government bound by law it did not simply invent as it went - runs through clause 29 of the 1297 confirmation (numbered clause 39 in 1215), not through the annulled and superseded 1215 text directly. The 1297 confirmation is the version that entered statute law, the version English lawyers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such as Edward Coke actually cited as binding law, and therefore the version whose specific language and legal standing were available to colonial lawyers and the framers. The Fifth Amendment's guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law descends from this text's promise of judgment according to the law of the land.

This is a claim about which legal text was operative, not a claim that the framers held this particular parchment in their hands. This exemplar's importance is that it is a physical survival of the specific 1297 statute-roll text, in the country whose founding document it helped shape, rather than a claim of direct physical transmission.

Lost in plain sight

Between 1297 and the twentieth century, this exemplar's ownership is not documented as a clean chain of named individuals. Sotheby's own 2007 catalogue, cataloguing the object it was about to sell, graded its own knowledge rather than asserting a smooth history: certain ownership by the Brudenell family only from the nineteenth century, probable ownership from the seventeenth, and possible ownership reaching back to the fourteenth. That graded uncertainty is the honest state of the evidence, and this record preserves it rather than compressing it into the tidier but false claim, common in press coverage, that the Brudenells held it continuously 'for centuries' or 'since the eighteenth century.'

The document resurfaced in modern memory in the 1970s, when it was found catalogued at the county record office in Northampton during review of the Brudenell family's papers - not discovered in an attic, but rediscovered in an archive, already known to exist but not understood as a saleable original. The family, once its significance was clear, sought a buyer.

Perot's purchase

H. Ross Perot, the Texas computer-services entrepreneur who had recently sold Electronic Data Systems to General Motors, bought the document from the Brudenell family. Sotheby's 2007 provenance statement dates the Perot Foundation's ownership from 1983; American newspapers, including the Washington Post, covered the purchase as news in September 1984, and most later accounts cite 1984 as the purchase year. This record has not been able to resolve whether the transaction was agreed privately in 1983 and only became public a year later, or whether the sources simply disagree - it reports both dates rather than silently choosing one. The price is consistently reported at 1.5 million US dollars, and the sale was a private transaction, not a public auction.

Perot's stated motive was patriotic rather than acquisitive in the collector's sense: he considered the charter the intellectual foundation of American liberty and wanted Americans to be able to see it. He lent it to the National Archives beginning in 1985, and on Constitution Day that September he delivered the keynote address at a naturalization ceremony for thirty new citizens held in front of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - the document he had just bought standing, in effect, as their shared ancestor.

Why the Perot Foundation sold it

The Perot Foundation ended its long-running loan to the National Archives in 2007 in order to sell the document at auction. Reporting at the time, including the Chronicle of Philanthropy and Al Jazeera, quoted a Foundation representative stating the proceeds would support medical research, public education, and assistance to wounded Iraq war veterans and their families - the conflict in Iraq was then in its fifth year, and veteran medical costs were a live public concern. This record reports that as the Foundation's stated intention, sourced to contemporaneous coverage at the time of the sale; it has not located independent later reporting confirming exactly how the resulting funds were disbursed, and that follow-through remains unverified rather than confirmed.

The only time it was ever auctioned

Sotheby's offered the document in New York on 18 December 2007 as a single-lot sale, lot 1, with an estimate of 20 to 30 million US dollars - deliberately imprecise, reflecting that nothing directly comparable had ever come to market. David Redden, Sotheby's vice chairman, was the auctioneer. David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, had learned of the sale almost by accident, reviewing accumulated mail on a flight from London, and was told by a curator at a pre-sale reception, with minutes to spare, that the document was likely to leave the United States if an American did not step in. He returned the next evening and bid by telephone from a side room.

The bidding closed at a hammer price of 19 million US dollars; with Sotheby's buyer's premium the total came to 21.3 million dollars. Almost every contemporary report states only the rounded total, without separating the two figures - this record separates them using Rubenstein's own account of his winning bid alongside contemporaneous reporting. No source consulted names the underbidder. It was, and remains, the only time an original Magna Carta of any year has been sold at public auction.

Back on the wall within months

Rubenstein placed the document on loan to the National Archives immediately, and it returned to public display on 12 March 2008, a gift of access rather than a change of legal ownership. In June 2010 the National Archives and Rubenstein announced a full re-encasement, replacing a case designed in 1985 by the conservator Dr Nathan Stolow. National Archives conservation and exhibition staff worked jointly with the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology on the new case, at a cost of 322,800 US dollars, underwritten by Rubenstein; the design drew on the technology built for the 2003 re-encasement of the Charters of Freedom - the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - housed in the same building.

The new case was previewed to press in the National Archives conservation lab on 2 February 2012, in the presence of Archivist David S. Ferriero, Rubenstein himself, conservation deputy director Kitty Nicholson and NIST project engineer Jay Brandenburg, and the document returned to public view on 17 February 2012 in a titanium-framed encasement filled with inert argon gas, engineered to hold parchment at constant humidity and slow oxidative degradation over the long term.

A gallery built around one document

In 2011 Rubenstein gave 13.5 million US dollars to the Foundation for the National Archives, separate from and far smaller than his 21.3 million dollar purchase price, to fund a purpose-built gallery and expanded visitor services. The David M. Rubenstein Gallery opened 10 December 2013, and this Magna Carta has been its centerpiece ever since, displayed as part of the Archives' Records of Rights exhibition alongside later American civil-rights documents - a deliberate curatorial argument that this 1297 confirmation is the first chapter of a continuous American story about who gets to claim rights against government power, not a freestanding medieval curiosity.

Three siblings, and what makes this one different

Three other originals of the 1297 confirmation are known to survive, and this record has verified their locations independently rather than repeating an unchecked list: one is held by the UK National Archives at Kew (catalogued as DL10/197); one by the City of London Corporation, kept at the London Archives and occasionally displayed at Guildhall; and one by the Australian Parliament, on permanent display at Parliament House, Canberra, purchased by the Australian government in 1952 for 12,500 pounds sterling after its own rediscovery at King's School, Bruton, in Somerset.

What distinguishes the Rubenstein-Perot copy from all three is not its parchment or its seal - all four are, so far as scholarship establishes, equally original acts of the 1297 chancery - but its ownership history. It is the only one of the four ever to have been privately owned, the only one ever bought and sold on the open market, and the only one outside the historic dominions of the British Crown. The other three moved between public institutions; this one moved through a private family, a Texan foundation, an auction room, and a private financier's gift of display, before arriving at a fourth kind of custody that is neither fully public ownership nor fully private possession: an indefinite loan to a federal archive, underwritten by its owner's own philanthropy.

What has not been challenged, and what remains open

No source consulted for this record - not Sotheby's own 2007 cataloguing, not National Archives conservation reporting, not later academic or journalistic coverage - records any scholarly challenge to this exemplar's authenticity, its seal, or its identification as a genuine act of the 1297 chancery. That silence is itself worth stating plainly rather than searching for a controversy that is not documented: unlike some other Magna Carta exemplars whose status has been actively debated by scholars in recent years, this one has not been.

Nor has this record found any documented export-licence dispute, heritage-law objection, or litigation over an English constitutional instrument residing permanently in American private and federal custody. Its departure from England predates the modern UK export-licensing regime built around the Waverley criteria in its current form being tested against an object of this kind, and no source consulted shows the British government ever formally objecting to its 1983-84 sale or its continued location in Washington.