[293]. See Report (1800), p. 341, containing the Return by the Chapter Clerk of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury, dated 15th May, 1800.
[294]. Dodsworth, Historical Account of the Cathedral, 202.
[295]. It is unnecessary to treat in detail of the copies of the charter not authenticated by John’s Great Seal, though some of these are of great value as secondary authorities. The four most important are (a) a copy appearing in the Register of Gloucester Abbey, (b) the Harleian MSS., British Museum No. 746 (which also contains the names of the twenty-five Executors in a hand probably of the reign of Edward I.), (c) in the Red Book of the Exchequer. There is also (d) an early French version, printed in D’Achery, Spicilegium, Vol. XII. p. 573, together with the writ of 27th September addressed to the Sheriff of Hampshire. See Blackstone, Great Charter, p. xviii., and Thomson, Magna Charta, pp. 428-430.
[296]. Thomas Madox, Firma Burgi (1726). On p. 45, Madox refers only to the Inspeximus of Edward I.
[297]. Robert Brady, Complete History of England, p. 126 of Appendix to Vol. I. (1685), takes his text of the Charter from Matthew Paris, “compared with the manuscript found in Bennet College Library.”
[298]. James Tyrrell, History of England (1697-1704). In p. 9 of Appendix to Vol. II. p. 821, Tyrrell prints a text of John’s Charter founded on that of M. Paris, collated with those two originals.
[299]. Henry Care, English Liberties in the Freeborn subjects’ inheritance; containing Magna Charta, etc. (1719), p. 5. The first edition, with a somewhat different title, is dated 1691.
[300]. Strangely enough, Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, so recently as 1837, in publishing his Rotuli Chartarum (Introduction, p. ii. note 5) declared that no original of John’s Charter existed. Many copies, he knew, had been "made and deposited, for the sake of perpetuation, in all the principal religious houses in the kingdom. However, notwithstanding all the care taken by multiplication of copies, it is singular that no contemporary copy of King John’s Magna Carta has yet been found." The Lincoln MS. he dismissed as “certainly not of so early a date,” while he confuses the only one of the British Museum MSS. known to him with the Articles of the Barons. He further reasserts the fallacy, so clearly exposed by Blackstone eighty years earlier, that John had issued a separate Carta de Foresta.
[301]. Thomson, Magna Charta, 422.
[302]. Reproductions of it, as well as of the second Cottonian version of the Charter, are sold by the authorities of the British Museum at the price of 2s. 6d.