Journey to the heart of the Magna Carta: On the trail of the original copy
COPIES OF the Magna Carta haven't always been as well cared-for as they are today.
"There's a legend that one copy was found in a tailor's shop," says Seif El Rashidi. "The tailor was about to cut it up and use it as a pattern for the clothes he was making." Seif, the man in charge of organising Salisbury Cathedral's celebrations of the charter's 800th anniversary this year, adds that another copy was once stored in a cave. And a librarian was so worried about her copy's safety that she kept it under her bed.
We're in the cathedral's Chapter House, bathed in green and purple light cast by the afternoon sun through stained glass windows. In front of us, carefully framed, is one of the four surviving original copies of the document that has been called "the foundation stone of English liberty" (there's another copy in Lincoln and two more at the British Library in London, as well as later versions elsewhere).
Considered the best-preserved of the four, Salisbury's is a single sheet of parchment about as big as a page of this newspaper.
Practically every square inch is packed with neat, tight handwriting, its ink hardly faded. It lists, in Latin, some of it abbreviated to save space, the constitutional guarantees agreed by King John at Runnymede in Surrey. The 800th anniversary of this historic moment is on June 15.
As Seif points out, the guarantees ranged wide, everything from basic human rights ("To no-one will we sell, to no-one deny or delay right or justice") to "There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth".
Backed by a £415,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant, Salisbury Cathedral will be marking the anniversary in fine style, with new displays, festivals, even a Magna Carta musical and a "Liber-Tea Party". The city also features on one of six online Magna Carta Trails linking places across England associated with the charter and taking between two and four days each. They range from York, Durham and Lincoln in the north to Dover, Canterbury and Rochester in the south.
To cater for non-drivers (or reluctant ones), coach companies are setting up Magna Carta tours of their own and it's on a weekend taster of one of these that my wife and I have come to Salisbury.
It is a delightful city, clustered around the cathedral, where the world's oldest clock has been clacking and clanking the seconds, minutes and hours away since the 14th century.
Across the Cathedral Green is Arundells, the elegant Georgian home of the late Sir Edward Heath, Tory Prime Minister in the early Seventies. "We like to show the other side of a public figure who was very private," says guide Peter Cracknell, leading the way from the glorious garden, as big as a TURN TO NEXT PAGE FROM PREVIOUS PAGE park and stretches all the way down to the River Avon.
"Sir Edward staged garden parties here and charged £1,000 a head, which he gave to the cathedral funds," he adds.
The house is furnished as Sir Edward left it, with mementoes of his musical and sailing interests, a red Downing Street despatch box and a reconstructed Ming bowl which someone had unfortunately dropped and smashed.
WE HAVE a busy weekend, zipping across Wiltshire by coach (and seeing far more of the gently undulating landscape than we ever would in a car). The biggest crowds are, predictably, at Stonehenge, where the angular and very expensive new visitor centre fills in the background before a "land train" shuttle trundles us to the actual stone circle, sitting a mile and a half away.
The new site arrangements may give some sense of the isolation the monument must once have had but it is hard not to feel processed through a packaged "visitor experience".
People are kept well away from the stones: no chance to stroll among them, as US President Barack Obama did so cheerily after the Nato summit in Wales in September 2014. Instead, the crowds stand staring at the stones, as though willing them to do something. Rotate, perhaps? Do a prehistoric twirl? We resist the urge to buy a Stonehenge snowglobe at the busy gift shop.
The rest of the trip demonstrates the great thing about coach tours: that they take you to places you might never have got round to visiting, even if you knew they existed.
I have long known about Bradford-on-Avon, for instance, thanks to St Laurence's, its celebrated Saxon church, but never expected to visit it.
What a charming discovery the town is, with its steep streets and steeper alleys and kingfishers darting, flashes of iridescent blue, across the river.
And the church, a tiny affair, is a delight, tall and boxy and only discovered in the 19th century after years of being swallowed up by surrounding buildings. Two winged angels soar in the rafters and echoing out of the medieval church across the road, an organ launches the Sunday morning service.
We drive a few miles north to Lacock Abbey, a country house built around a 13th-century convent. It really is an enchantingly atmospheric place, with an odd sort of Alice In Wonderland eccentricity.
A Victorian owner, William Henry Fox Talbot, effectively created modern photography here in the 1830s when he exposed a postage stamp-sized negative of a latticed window. The window is still here, just along the corridor from a reproduction of the 1225 version of the Magna Carta that was housed at Lacock until 1946; that original is now an important display in the British Museum.
It reminds us of Salisbury Cathedral where Chris Morgan, an irrepressibly enthusiastic guide, stands proudly on duty next to its copy of the Magna Carta.
"I always say that for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoons, I'm in sole charge of one of the most important artefacts in the history of the English-speaking peoples," he beams.
Just don't give it to a passing tailor, Chris.
l ? GETTING THERE For tours by coach to Wiltshire visit findacoachholiday.com (0870 850 2839). Shearings (0844 822 6866/shearings.com) has a day at the Magna Carta and Salisbury Cathedral on a five-day holiday based in Bournemouth (from £299pp, two sharing, half board). The Hilton Swindon (08705 909 090/hilton.com) offers doubles from £100 per night, room only.
Magna Carta Trails (magnacartatrails.com) has free details of six routes the length of the country. Wiltshire tourism: visitwiltshire.co.uk
