Saturday, July 25, 2015

The Bill of Rights of the United States

Earlier this year, I wrote that I had digitally cleaned up and enhanced an image of one of the original copies of the Bill of Rights of the United States, before now, I haven't posted it online.  I have decided to do so right now.

Though I intended in the beginning to digitally create a cleaner, restored version of the scanned copy of the original held and displayed by the National Archives, it would be more accurate to say of the final product that I traced the writing in the original image to create a faithful representation of that writing than that what I have created is the same document that I started with, but cleaner.  Considering that the document that I started with is itself really only a scanned, digital representation of the solid, original copy, it is debatable what language would be best for expressing what I actually did, but I can at least make sure that people who look at this know what they're getting.

This document isn't perfect, but I think it meets a need that otherwise is not yet served on the Internet (unless I overlooked similar documents online when I searched for them).

''Article the First'', the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, and the ten amendments most commonly known as The Bill of Rights

Monday, June 15, 2015

"Rectum vel Judiciam"

I do still wonder why the Salisbury Cathedral copy of Magna Charta reads "rectum vel iudiciam" in Chapter 40, unlike the other two surviving (and still-legible) copies of that original, 1215 edition.  Those other two copies read, "rectum aut iudiciam".

I assume that it is nothing more than an error made by someone who was responsible for writing out the words on each copy, but I am still curious.  I have not yet looked into whether anyone else has investigated it.  Once I have done that, I will report on what I find.  (Also, if anyone reading this knows what, if anything, those who may have already investigated this have discovered, please let me know.  Thank you.)

Friday, June 12, 2015

The Virginia Declaration of Rights

I have already quoted quite a bit of language from some of the early American state constitutions, but as a number of those constitutions themselves happen to point out, there is something to be gained from a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.  Since today is the 239th anniversary of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, this is an appropriate time to make a point of re-familiarizing ourselves with it.

Friday, May 22, 2015

A Time When "Vel" Looked Like "Ut"

About a week ago, I wrote that I had noticed something unexpected in the surviving copies of the original, 1215 version of Magna Charta -- that at a couple of important points in the document, the word "ut" appears where "vel" has always been thought to have been used.  I found it difficult to believe that the world had failed to notice this in the nearly eight hundred years since Magna Charta was negotiated, approved, and first published, but every source that I had checked (other than the originals -- or so it appeared -- and with the additional exception of two nineteenth century German-language books on law) used "vel" where those original copies appeared (to me) unmistakably to read "ut".  As a result, even though I continued to feel as though I must somehow have overlooked or misunderstood something, I published the post about all of this.

I continued to look over the documents for the several days that followed, looking into everything I noticed along the way that I thought might make sense of this.  Then, a few days ago, I noticed that what I had read as "ut" appeared at many other points throughout Magna Charta.  Comparing again the surviving original copies of Magna Charta (using scanned, high-quality images of those copies) with what has traditionally been regarded as the true wording of its 1215 edition, I found that what I had believed to be the word "ut" appears in the original copies at each of the nearly one hundred points where "vel" is supposed to be.  Up to that point, I had been nearly certain that the word in question is "ut", even though I realized how unlikely it is for something like this to be overlooked by the entire world for such a long time.  The word happens to look exactly like a "u" followed by a "t", which one would ordinarily be justified in assuming is the Latin word "ut".  However, once I saw that the word appears in the original copies in all of the nearly one hundred places where "vel" should be, it became obvious that the word (even though it looks like a "u" immediately followed by a "t") was almost certainly "vel".  Additionally, though I had previously noticed that "Chapter 39" would have made more sense if the word had been "ut" instead of "vel", when I read * other sentences throughout Magna Charta with "ut" in place of "vel", those sentences no longer made sense at all.  The word is "vel", not "ut".

I have thought about why "vel" looks so much like "ut" in the surviving copies of the 1215 Magna Charta, and it now appears as though it is nothing more than a coincidence.  In all of its appearances throughout the charter, "vel" is abbreviated as "vl".  As written in Magna Charta (and in many other old documents), the letters "u" and "v" are difficult to distinguish from one another, so the abbreviation for "vel" looks like "ul", which can easily be confused with "ut".


* I know very little Latin, but I knew enough to understand how the substitution would affect the relationship between certain words.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Nisi Per Legale Judicium Parium Suorum Ut Per Legem Terrae

Update: I have now confirmed that the word (discussed throughout this post) that I initially read as "ut" is, in fact, "vel", just as it has almost always been given when the transcribed, Latin wording of the 1215 version of Magna Charta has been published.  The word certainly does resemble "ut", but I now know that as represented using the system of abbreviation used in Magna Charta and other documents in the early thirteenth century, "vel" is difficult to distinguish from "ut".  I have decided to leave this post as it was (other than in that this update has, of course, been inserted at the beginning of the post), but those who read it should keep in mind that I was writing about something that I now know to be false.

The 800th anniversary of Magna Charta is one month and one day from today, so I think I was reasonable (along with nearly everyone else, apparently) in assuming that we'd had enough time to correctly transcribe the Latin text from any or all of the three known surviving (and still-legible) original copies of the 1215 (and first issued) version of Magna Charta.  In a strict sense, our assumption was true, but everywhere I have looked (so far) for the original, Latin text of that 1215 version, I have found text which, though largely consistent with the wording of the 1215 Magna Charta, included at least one mistake.  That mistake would have been easy to make and difficult to catch, but it may have significantly affected the apparent meaning of what later came to be known as "Chapter 39" of the 1215 Magna Charta.

As I see them, these are the words of Chapter 39, "Nullus liber homo capiatur ut imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum ut per legem terræ."

In every publication (covering a variety of formats)*, however, in which I have found a version of the text of the 1215 Magna Charta or of its "Chapter 39", both of the places where I found the word "ut" (and placed it in the sentence above) were filled instead with "vel".  In later editions of Magna Charta, including the version which is regarded as a statute and was subsequently confirmed several dozen times, "vel" actually does stand in place of "ut", which I suspect either resulted in or resulted from the misreading of the original, 1215 version of the charter.  However, I am confident that I am correct in seeing "ut" (rather than "vel") in the three known surviving, legible copies of the 1215 Magna Charta.

When I first noticed this, I was looking at a high-quality, scanned image of one of the two "Cotton" copies of the 1215 charter.



The more interesting "ut" of the two is the one which precedes "per legem terræ," but the "ut" which appears earlier in the sentence did turn out to be more important than I had initially thought.



In this copy, the word used is clearly "ut", not "vel".  At that point, however, I wasn't sure whether to conclude that the wording of the 1215 charter is not what it has been believed to be or that the discrepancy was reason to doubt the identity or authenticity of that copy of the charter.  I wanted to know which was right, of course, and since I was already aware that there were two other known, surviving, and legible original copies of the 1215 Magna Charta, I found images of them online in order to see and decide for myself (though admittedly not in person) which words they used.

First, I looked at the image of the "Lincoln" copy.



The word preceding "per legem terræ" looks more like "ut" than like "vel" in the Lincoln copy, but it is not nearly as easy to read in this copy (or in the "Salisbury" copy, as it turned out) as in the still-legible Cotton copy.  As a result, the "ut" which links "capiatur" with "imprisonetur" near the beginning of the sentence is even more important than I had first thought:



Even if the "ut" preceding "per legem terræ" had become impossible to recognize as either "ut" or "vel" in the Lincoln and Salisbury copies, the clarity in both copies of the "ut" between "capiatur" and "imprisonetur" would have allowed us to conclusively confirm that which initially seemed so implausible: that at least one "ut" in these three copies of the 1215 Magna Charta somehow came to be recorded elsewhere as "vel", and we did not notice it until a month and a day before the charter's 800th anniversary.

In the Salisbury copy, the "ut" which is followed with "per legem terræ" looks a little distorted, but it still appears to be the letters "u" and "t", and I do not think it looks at all like "vel".



The other "ut" is easily identifiable as "ut".



The Articles of the Barons and the 1216 and 1217 versions of Magna Charta also appear to use "ut", not "vel", in Chapter 39.

For all of these reasons, I am certain that the word is "ut".  I am a bit less confident in my impression that what I have noticed is unknown to other people (including those who care which Latin words actually do appear in "Chapter 39" of the 1215 version of Magna Charta), but I expect to learn a little more about that from their reactions as I share this information with them.





* My Google searches for this did turn up two results (which Google seems to have rounded down to zero, though I do not know what the purpose of that was:

 ...), though both of those books were (apart from the Latin, of course) written in German.  Being written in German would have tended to prevent people from reading them who were already familiar with the Latin text of the 1215 Magna Charta as it had been represented in English-language books, and that would have reduced the probability that someone would notice the difference between the two versions of the Latin text.

Monday, April 20, 2015

A Clean Copy of the Bill of Rights, Finally

For the past several months, I have been working on cleaning and enhancing an image of a copy of the "Bill of Rights" of the United States.  The original image, which I found on the website of the Library of Congress, is itself a fairly high-resolution image.  Unfortunately, the original document -- the hard copy that was created over 220 years ago and which was scanned in order to create the digital image now found on the Library of Congress website -- is faded, stained, and barely legible.  It looks as though it had spent many of its years folded and stored in somebody's glove compartment (taken out only whenever the owner was eating lunch in the car and needed to use it as a napkin).
 
I noticed this late last year when I decided to compose a cleaner-looking version of the background image for this website.  In order to create that new background image, I returned to the sources of the phrases seen in the background in order to make higher-quality versions of those phrases to take place of the rough and difficult-to-read versions that I had used in earlier versions of the background. Since many of those phrases were taken from the Bill of Rights, I thought (incorrectly) that I could save myself time and effort by cleaning up that entire document at once instead of working on the areas that I needed one-at-a-time. I quickly realized that cleaning up the entire document would take longer than I had initially thought, but by that time, I had a new reason to finish the work: We deserve to have a presentable reproduction of that early, engrossed copy of the Bill of Rights, and (unless I simply overlooked it when I was searching for one) no one had yet created one.

I am writing all of this now because my work on this enhanced copy of the Bill of Rights is finally finished. There is room for improvement, of course, but I have realized that this kind of project can never really reach a point at which it would be objectively correct and complete (particularly considering that my project involved altering a digital copy, not cleaning or restoring a hard copy). However, I am satisfied with the way that it looks at this point; I consider it complete.