Wednesday
Magna Carta: yours for $21,321,000 (£10.6M);
Tales of Beedle the Bard: £1,950,000 ($4M)
Of course tha latter may be a more useful guide to one's liberties in New Britain ™
At least someone had the sense to charge for one copy of our holiest charter of freedom. If Gordon Brown had been in charge of the deal then he would probably given it away, seeing how his party has consistently treated the Magna Carta as toilet paper anyway.
Posted by Julian Taylor at December 19, 2007 10:12 AM
Good to see that the last copy in private hands has remained that way; makes it a bit harder for the government to claim they are all "too fragile" to be put on public display, and thus to encourage us to forget there was ever a document that offered us certain freedoms.
Posted by MarkE at December 19, 2007 10:22 AM
Economic value is subjective - but then the value of great charter is not just how much money someone is prepared to pay for it (which will be less than or equal to the monetary value they place on the document).
MarkE - the copy at Lincoln Castle is on display (or was the last time I was there), but I agree that the powers-that-be do not like it.
They can dismiss it as just about "Barons and Church" - but the fact that anyone could make the state limit its activties is something they do not like at all.
One of the last actions of Pope Innocent III (he of the sake of Constantinople, the persecution of the Jews, the crusade aganst the Cathars, and various other things that were in no way his fault) was to annul Magna Carta.
Thankfully the Barons did not accept this - and neither did a lot of learned Churchmen.
A charter of liberties should be well written - that is what the Churchmen are for. But its basis is military - or it is worthless.
Even the Charter of Henry the First in 1100 was based in military matters.
Henry offered various limitations on state power in return for the people of England rising to help fight his elder brother.
In Anglo Saxon law (as with all germanic codes - and the nongermanic codes of the Classical World before the rise of the Empire) a free man is someone who is allowed to carry weapons, for the defence of himslef and the Republic (the public - Res Publica) in general.
The British Bill of Rights (now long forgotten - even by "conservatives") and the American State and Union Bill of Rights are based on the same principle.
Posted by Paul Marks at December 20, 2007 01:43 AM
