SANDWICH, KENT—An edition of the Magna Carta produced in 1300 has been discovered in an archive in eastern England. The original Magna Carta, issued by King John, was signed in 1215 and established the rule of law and equality before the law. The 1300 version was issued by King Edward I and was marked with a royal seal and belonged to the town of Sandwich. About a third of the Sandwich copy is missing and it no longer retains its seal, however. The document had been filed inside a nineteenth-century scrapbook, along with a copy of the Charter of the Forest, which provided some rights and privileges to the common people. “It must have been much more widely distributed than previously thought because if Sandwich had one…the chances are it went out to a lot of other towns. And it is very likely that there are one or two out there somewhere that no one has spotted yet,” Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia told The Guardian. To read about archaeology in the region, see "The Kings of Kent."
