I don't always know where to put topics but I suppose the Magna Carta could be considered political ideology.  On the other hand this could almost go under the thread of present history, or something about places.  But here it is.

I read today (and I don't think it's been mentioned here before) that another copy of the Magna Carta has just been found.  NZ's main online news site had a story from the Washington Post about an ancient copy of it being found at Sandwich.  Sandwich find  The American slant pointed to it being in part responsible for the US Constitution.  I am more interested in it being found in Sandwich, a town which has among its church grounds the graves of quite a number of my husband's ancestors and which we have wandered round.

But I have got a bit uncertain about these news items considering people's reactions to other historical "discoveries".  I can't see why this wouldn't be definitely genuine though.  And seems quite an exciting find to me. I don't know what quality this document is in; when our Treaty of Waitangi was looked at in 1908 it was found to have been partially eaten by rats, and then it spent its time in the war at the side of a corridor in the Public Trust office, the staff not having been told what it was when an MP left it.  And just a year after its signing it almost went up in flames.  I think there have been facsimile copies around since at least 1877.

Its discovery did make the British newspapers but given all the brouhaha about Magna Carta at the moment I'm surprised more wasn't made of it. The Sandwich copy of Magna Carta is a 1300 exemplification produced by Edward I. Besides the four surviving original 1215 charters, there are 20 or so surviving copies and drafts which were made/issued in 1216, 1217, 1225, 1297, and 1300. The Sandwich one isn't in very good condition but it is interesting because it's bound together with a copy of the 'Charter of the Forest' which was originally issued alongside Magna Carta. Since the Sandwich copy has only just emerged I guess it's quite possible other copies remain to be discovered which have lain hidden away and overlooked in County Record Offices and the like (the Sandwich copy was actually found in Kent County Records Office in Maidstone). As you've been there you know that today Sandwich is a very small town but in the past it was an important port, one of the 'Cinque Ports' charged with defence of the Channel ... until the sea retreated and left the town high and dry.

Here's the Sandwich Magna Carta - as you can see quite a large chunk is missing, there's some water damage and it is missing the royal seal, but it's still estimated to be worth about £10million:



And here's a local news article: Kent online 8 Feb 2015

Extraordinary what turns up in Sandwiches - never found anything worth more than 10p in any I've dared open.

The trouble with those dusty shelves of ancient documents is that only  expert hands may get close to them and they need paying for it these days. Gone are the days of the cultured curious who can afford the time. And if another is found what chances are there that someone will not try to make a pile out of it. Such documents may have great value but can they be sold?

Well regarding this particular document, although it has passed through several hands before it eventually found its way amongst a bundle of other old documents into the County Records Office, all parties involved seem to agreed that as it is a legal document issued to the town of Sandwich, then the current Sandwich town council are the legal owners. And thankfully the council seem keen to retain ownership and make the document available for public viewing. They've already recognised that to do this they will have to come up with something like £10,000 to provide a suitable environmentally-controlled and secure display cabinet, but I see they are already thinking of offering it on loan (and for a substantial fee) to the town of Sandwich in Massachusetts ... perhaps as the first venue of a lucrative US tour in this 800th anniversary year.

And yes they can be sold (as with any great works of art or important documents or antiquities, the UK government can put a temporary block on the sale to allow time for British museums, libraries, charities etc to try and raise the cash, but ultimately they can still be sold, even to foreign buyers) ... a 1297 issue of Magna Carta originally held by the King's School in Somerset was sold in 1952 to the Australian Government for £12,500, and is now on display in the Members' Hall of Parliament House, Canberra. Another 1297 copy, originally held by the Earl of Cardigan, was sold in 1984 to the Perot Foundation in the US, which then in 2007 sold it to US businessman David Rubenstein for US$21.3 million, and this copy is now on permanent loan to the National Archives in Washington DC.

Meles meles wrote:

The Sandwich one isn't in very good condition but it is interesting because it's bound together with a copy of the 'Charter of the Forest' which was originally issued alongside Magna Carta.

The Sandwich copies are now housed in the town’s Guildhall Museum. What’s slightly odd with regard to the Charter of the Forest is that there was little or no forest in Kent. That’s forest in the Norman legal sense. There is a King’s Wood in the North Downs near Challock but its name is believed to predate the Normans going back to the reign of Egbert II of Kent in the 8th Century in that it was favoured by the king but was not necessarily the sole preserve of him. Following the Conquest, however, William granted the wood to the monks of Battle Abbey in Sussex.

Later, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII granted it to Sir Anthony Browne as a reward. The story goes that Henry along with some companions (including Browne) went to meet his new bride Anne of Cleves who was staying at Rochester Abbey. The meeting was incognito with Henry at first disguising himself before revealing his true identity. Henry was famously disappointed with Anne’s real-life appearance which did not match the reports he had received nor with Holbein’s portrait of her. Browne was the only one of his fellows who dared to concur and (as Master of the Horse) is believed to have also coined the unkind nickname for Anne of ‘Flanders Mare’. This encouraged Henry to seek a swift annulment and he granted Battle Abbey (including the King’s Wood) to Browne in gratitude for his honesty. Rochester Abbey itself was dissolved later that year. Ironically King’s Wood today is owned by the Forestry Commission.

The Sandwich copies of Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest seem to date from 1297/1300 when Edward I had the two documents re-issued together and distributed to towns and cities throughout the realm as the Confirmatio Cartarum (Confirmation of Charters). Although rediscovered in the Kent Records Office at Maidstone and having likely passed through various hands over the years, the documents were indeed originally issued to Sandwich which until its decline in the 16th century was an important town (it's one of the Cinque Ports and thus probably why it was issued with full copies of these documents.

At a little further round Kent's northern coast, Faversham also has a copy of Magna Carta that's from the same 1300 re-issue and which at the foot states (in Latin) that it was issued to "the barons of the Port of Faversham". Like Sandwich, Faversham was then an important harbour, just 10 miles from Canterbury and on Watling Street, the main road linking London to Dover. Their copy of Magna Carta is in much better condition than the Sandwich one:



Regarding the location of Royal Forests in England - there probably weren't any in Kent because it was for the most part already intensively-cultivated agricultural land (the county was always known as the 'garden of England' for a reason). It was highly valuable for tax purposes, providing manpower for the defence of the realm and in simply feeding London and all the other commercial, religious and military centers that were concentrated in the south-east of the country. But that doesn't however explain why the neighbouring county of Sussex, which retained large tracts of ancient and largely uninhabited woodland until the 17th century, had only two very small pockets of Royal Forest. In the English midlands Royal Forests were established along the heavily-wooded alluvial plain surrounding the River Severn (eg the Forest of Dean), across the woodlands on the central lowland belt of Jurassic clays, shales and sandstones (eg at Shotover, Wychwood and Rutland) and on top of limestone and sandstone hills (eg Sherwood Forest). By contrast in the south the Royal Forests were generally limited to sandy, gravelly soils (such as the New Forest in Hampshire and the Royal Forests around London at Epping, Bagshot, Windsor and Richmond) and they entirely avoided the wooded region of the Weald in Sussex and Kent. The two small Royal Forests in Sussex were at Ashurst near Horsham (on a sandstone ridge) and inland from Hastings (again on sandstone). Although the Sussex Weald was ancient and heavily-wooded forest, inhabited by plenty of game animals and relatively few people, the lowlands to either side of the central sandstone ridge are mostly of very heavy Cretaceous clays and so I assume the Norman and Angevin kings just didn't want to get bogged-down by the heavy water-logged ground underfoot.

The land-use/soil-type suggestion as to why there was no forest in Kent makes sense. The ‘Invicta’ tradition, of course, would have it that the ‘Swanscombe standoff’ in 1067 was the reason why William and his successors thenceforth generally left Kent alone. A monument in the churchyard of St Peter & St Paul in the village reads:

'Near this spot in the year 1067, by ancient tradition the Men of Kent and Kentish Men carrying boughs on their shoulders and swords in their hands, met the invader William, Duke of Normandy. They offered peace if he would grant their ancient rights and liberties otherwise war and that most deadly. Their request was granted and from that day the motto of Kent has been ‘Invicta’ meaning Unconquered.'


 (photo courtesy Robin Webster (cc-by-sa/2.0))

The story and meaning of the Swanscombe standoff are debated. Even the year it occurred isn’t agreed upon. Some suggest that it occurred in November 1066 after Dover and Canterbury had already submitted to William - events which themselves would put a huge question mark over the whole ‘invicta’ claim. By the time he reached Swanscombe (well to the west of the Medway) the conqueror was about to leave Kent and was approaching London. In which case the Swanscombe affair can be seen as being merely good propaganda on his part. A piece of theatre, as it were, to show the Londoners et al that he was a ruler who stood for continuity and not change. The negative reception, however, he subsequently received during his unpopular coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day would suggest that they were not taken in. Another view is that the standoff occurred in the summer of 1067 when William attempted to return to Kent but by which time the locals had regained their courage. A criticism of the 1066 version of the story would also point out that boughs with leaves upon them would not really have featured in November although, that said, the autumn fall can come quite late in some years. I would tend to go with the prosaic 1066-politically-engineered-stunt suggestion, but the 1067-confrontation-with-leafy-boughs-held-high-and-blood-curdling-oaths-uttered legend is certainly more poetic and even Shakespearean sounding.

The story is, however, apocryphal, as it wasn’t first written down until 200 years later by the Benedictine monk Thomas Sprot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury. It, therefore, probably tells us more about the Church’s relationship with the then king Edward Longshanks than anything else. Edward was in the initial stages of his dispute with Llewellyn of Griffith, Prince of Wales. The then archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham was ostensibly tasked with acting as a mediator between the 2 magnates but in reality was partisan towards Longshanks. The Swanscombe legend, therefore, can be seen as a justification of conquest by showing how this can (supposedly) be achieved without infringing upon the ancient rites of the conquered and furthermore with the blessing of the Church. In Sprot’s account of the Swanscombe standoff, the Kentish men were headed by Stigand, archbishop of Canterbury and Egelsin, abbott of St Augustine’s. The subsequent Confirmatio Cartarum by Edward was no doubt a continuation of this charm offensive.
   
Whatever the truth of the matter, the Swanscombe standoff/Invicta story is often pointed to by historians as being a classic example of how a widely held belief can be difficult to shift even when the historiological evidence is set out. Be wary of denying folk their legends.

Whatever the truth behind William's (or Edward's) agreement with the men of Kent, the county did nevertheless retain a degree of independence in legal matters until comparatively recently. I went to school in the neighbouring county of Sussex and while we doubtless followed the National Curriculum (if such a thing existed back in my day) at pre-GCE level we focussed mostly on local history (ie Southern England) and I remember being taught how Kent had uniquely retained a form of law that pre-dated the Norman conquest. Kent operated a form of gavelkind (I had to look that up, my memory is not that good) which was a system of land tenure primarily concerned with inheritance (whether the land was owned outright or just held as a tenancy). In particular gavelkind specified inheritance among all male descendants, while the feudal system introduced by the Normans relied on primogeniture in which the land usually went in its entirety to the eldest son alone. In this the gavelkind in Kent was similar to the ancient laws and traditions that operated in medieval Wales and Ireland before they too had come under Norman control. In Kent gavelkind continued as a form of customary law long after the middle ages and was only fully abolished in the 20th century (by the Administration of Estates Act, 1925).

I'd missed this story, MM. Admittedly, I tend to watch the news on catch up on the computer these days rather than watch it live. If I understand correctly it wasn't exactly found for the first time but had been filed folk recognising (or else forgetting) that it was in fact the Magna Carta.