Magna Carta at auction

Not the original, of course, but an important early copy:

A rare copy of the Magna Carta has been sold for £10.6m ($21.3m) in an auction at Sotheby's in New York.

The 1297 copy, which is one of only 17 of the document still in existence, went to an unknown bidder.

The auction item had been owned by American billionaire Ross Perot's Perot Foundation since 1984 and was on view at the National Archives in Washington . . .

The auctioned copy, the only one in private hands, had been expected to fetch £9.94m ($20m) when it went under the hammer.

From the BBC. More detail in the Times of London:

The 1297 example, described as the most important document to come up for sale, was acquired by David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group, at Sotheby's in New York. He has paid $8,528 a word. . .

Four of the surviving 17 copies date from the reign of John, eight from that of Henry III and five from that of Edward I. The Sotheby's example bears the wax seal of King Edward I hanging from a ribbon at the bottom of the parchment -- one of only five that still carry the royal seal. . .

The only other original outside Britain was a gift by the country to "The People of Australia". It is on display at the Parliament in Canberra. . .

Mr Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle private equity group and a former deputy domestic policy adviser to President Carter, said that he would put the document back on public view at the National Archives in Washington, where it had been on loan. . .

He admitted that he could not actually read it because he had avoided learning Latin at school -- a decision he now regrets.

Also a bit more on Perot's acquisition of the document:

Mr Perot acquired it for $1.5 million in 1984 from relatives of James Thomas Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Magna Carta had been at the Brudenells' family seat at Deene Park, Northamptonshire, for more than half a millennium.

Posted by David on December 18, 2007 9:57 PM