Magna Carta

Origins and Legacy

Nicholas Vincent

This book tells the story of the birth and development of Magna Carta from its origins to the modern day. It also reproduces and describes, for the very first time, every surviving copy of the Great Charter, as well as related charters of the period, including various new discoveries. It addresses the previously unanswered question of how the charter was published and disseminated to the shires of England and includes a chapter on the charter’s scribes and sealing, supplying a truly unique insight into both the creation and afterlife of the most fundamental legal document in British history.

Nicholas Vincent is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy and an author and coauthor of several books about the Magna Carta including the very popular "Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction". He has been based at UEA since 2003, having taught at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Canterbury.  This energetic 'historian's historian' has published twenty-five books and some 150 academic articles on various aspects of English and European history in the 12th and 13th centuries.  Demonstrating boundless wit and dazzling erudition, it was Prof. Nicholas Vincent who helped to discover a long lost 1300 edition of the Magna Carta issued by King Edward I that lay neglected in the town archives of Sandwich in Kent, England for centuries.