Australia's Magna Carta (review)

On permanent display in Australia's Parliament House in Canberra is one of only two thirteenth-century copies of Magna Carta outside England. The other copy, now in the National Archives in Washington, DC, was sold at auction in 2007 for US$21.3 million. Both are copies of the 1297 Inspeximus version, re-issued by Edward I's council in his name while he was campaigning in Flanders. This booklet tells the story of how Australia came to have its copy of Magna Carta. It was discovered at a school in Somerset in the 1930s and sold to the Australian Government in 1952 - in the face of vigorous opposition from the British Museum. Nicholas Vincent, from the University of East Anglia, provides a detailed account of the machinations surrounding the sale, for the then substantial amount of £12,500. The charter's adventures were not quite over, however, for its location became the focus of a dispute in the 1960s between the newly created National Library of Australia and the Australian Parliament - a dispute that was not officially resolved until 2005.

Vincent gives a lively and authoritative account of the history of Magna Carta, and particularly of the circumstances surrounding the 1297 reissue. He also provides a plausible explanation for the way in which this copy, originally addressed to the county of Surrey, ended up in the King's School in Bruton in Somerset. This is supplemented by Kylie Scroope's short but fascinating description of the preservation measures applied to the charter by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). It took eight years to complete the work of enclosing the charter in a glass and metal container filled with argon gas, where it has remained for the last fifty years.

The booklet is intended for the general public, rather than the researcher. One result is that there is an English translation, with a lengthy glossary, but no transcription of the Latin text; another is that the colour photograph of the charter is too small to be legible. A standard catalogue description would also have been useful. Nevertheless, this is a very welcome and valuable account of the history and provenance of Australia's best-known medieval manuscript.