Early last month I tripped on up to the British Library for the ‘Magna Carta Unification Event’. Manuscripts had been choppered in from Salisbury, Lincoln, and indeed (x2) from the British Library’s own collection. It was my chance to catch ‘all four surviving original 1215 Magna Carta Manuscripts in one place for the first time’.
Now, I don’t have any strongly-held views on how you pull out all the stops when it comes to exhibiting a handful of 800-year-old documents. But given the much-vaunted constitutional impact of King John’s power-wrangling at Runnymede, the Magna Carta’s reputation as ‘one of the most famous documents in history’, and the habitual cross-referencing to other momentous world events such as the Civil War (English), the Declaration of Independence, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – well, I was expecting a bit of a show.
The reality was less than overwhelming.
Access to the library’s Conference Centre was controlled by a score or more of attendants dressed in era-appropriate garb, calling everyone ‘milord’ and ‘nuncle’.
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