Man, 46, charged with trying to steal Magna Carta from Salisbury Cathedral

A man has been charged with trying to steal one of the oldest surviving copies of the Magna Carta.

Mark Royden, 46, will appear at Salisbury Magistrates’ Court, charged with attempted theft and criminal damage of the historic manuscript, on Friday.

Salisbury Cathedral’s copy of the text is one of four that remain from the original 1215 charter.

The copy, describe as the ‘best original’, is in a glass box at the cathedral for the thousands of yearly visitors to see.

Police said they were alerted after someone tried to smash the glass box on October 25 last year.

The Magna Carta was not damaged and nobody was injured in the incident.

It was kept in storage while work was carried out to replace the case, but return to the cathedral in February.

King John issued the Magna Carta after agreeing peace terms with a band of rebel barons and it is now one of the world’s most celebrated legal documents.

It established for the first time that neither monarch nor government was above the law and set out principles of liberty which echoed through the centuries.