A team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been working for the National Archives in Washington, USA to design and build a state-of-the-art encasement and transport cart to protect the Archive’s prized copy of the 1297 Magna Carta .
Their work—and the freshly conserved Magna Carta—were on display at a special “behind-the-scenes” showing at the National Archives Conservation Lab. The enclosure is designed to visually enhance the parchment document while maintaining the interior environment so it does not degrade the document, which is the underpinning to rights and liberties of Western Civilisation and United States law.
The first Magna Carta was signed in 1215 by King John of England, when he was forced by an assembly of barons to put in writing, for the first time, the traditional rights and liberties of the country’s free persons. After another confrontation with barons, Edward I not only reissued Magna Carta in 1297, but for the first time, it was entered into the official Statute Rolls of England and became the foundation of English law.
Despite this importance, by the second half of the 19th century nearly all of its clauses had been repealed in their original form. Three clauses still remain part of the law of England and Wales, however, Lord Denning recently described it as “the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”
King John from De Rege Johanne (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
The owner of this rare copy of Magna Carta (one of only four surviving charters), David M. Rubinstein, loaned the document to the National Archives and paid for its restoration and encasement.
While the Archives refurbished the parchment, NIST engineers and crafts-people built a platform to hold this copy of Magna Carta, the large encasement now sits in and a heavy-duty cart.
NIST worked from a three-dimensional laser scan of the document to support it on the platform and to create a nest to hold the original wax seal with Edward I’s likeness, which is attached to Magna Carta by a frail parchment ribbon.
The platform was created from a single 6-inch thick block of aluminium to minimize the number of joints that could cause leaks in the encasement, around 90 per cent of the block was cut away with a computer-controlled milling machine based on the three-dimensional image to create the perfect fit.
The Magna Carta rests in its argon-filled NIST encasement at the Archives Conservation lab. Image: Hill/NARA
The encasement cover is made of a special laminated glass with anti-reflective coatings to ensure maximum visibility of the document while protecting it. This is then sealed with close-fitting bolts that hold the frame against double O-rings that create an airtight seal. The case was filled with argon gas and will be monitored to avoid as much oxidation damage as possible.
It will be placed inside the new interactive display in the West Rotunda Gallery of the U.S. National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. There, alongside three other documents for which NIST built similar enclosures—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—it will be on display for the 1 million visitors that pass through the Archives each year.
Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology
More information:
- Magna Carta in full at the British Library (with full interactive media
- To learn more about previous NIST work on document enclosures, visit “For Posterity: NIST Helps to Preserve the ‘Charters of Freedom’”
- National Archives in Washington