Magna Carta

Edition

Charles Bémont, Chartes des libertés anglaises (1100-1305), Paris, Alphonse Picard, 1892, text V (Grande Charte de Jean sans Terre), pp. 26-39. Bémont follows the photographic facsimile of the British Museum: “Ce fac-similé reproduit l’original du manuscrit Cotton Aug. II, 106; c’est lui que nous avons suivi dans la présente édition” (p. 25), and gives the clauses “la numérotation des éditions modernes” (p. 26). The text comes from the OCR of the archive.org scan above (University of Toronto copy), collated word by word with the OCR of a second scan (archive.org chartesdeslibert00bemo) and with the transcription of la.wikisource (Magna Carta (Bémont)), and every page (pp. 26-39) was read against the page images; some 240 words and clause numbers misread by the OCR were corrected. The spelling of the edition is kept (gracia, Anglie, tocius, Sarrisberie, justitiam and peregrinatione beside justiciam and peregrinacione), as are Bémont’s square brackets in clauses 48 and 53 (words that the original writes at the foot of the charter, as his note says) and the mark after “trethingi’” (clause 25), printed in both copies. Differences: Bémont’s italics, which mark the words and clauses absent from the reissue of 1225, are set in roman; the words divided at line ends are joined; the spaces that the French typography of the edition puts before commas, full stops, semicolons and colons are removed; the clause numbers “1.” to “63.” are set as labels. Left out: the heading “Concordia inter Regem Johannem et Barones pro concessione libertatum ecclesie et regni Anglie”, which Bémont’s note calls an endorsement on the back of the Lincoln original (“Cote mise au dos de l’original de Lincoln”), not part of the text; the editorial “(sic)” after the second “centum libras” (clause 2); the footnote calls and the footnotes (including the text of the letters testimonial quoted under clause 62), running heads and page numbers. Two damaged letters printed in both copies are read as the words they belong to: “quinaue” (p. 38, clause 61) is set as “quinque” and “gravandc” (same page) as “gravando”.

Rights

The charter was granted in June 1215. The edition was published in Paris in 1892; its editor Charles Bémont was born on 16 November 1848 and died on 21 September 1939 (Wikidata Q2958663; the archive.org record names him “Bémont, Charles, 1848-1939”). The text is in the public domain in France (the editor died before 1 January 1956) and in the United States (published before 1931).