A Quick Answer, With Some Actual Context
The Magna Carta was sealed in 1215. June 15th, to be precise, at Runnymede, a wet meadow by the Thames between London and Windsor. King John agreed to it under significant duress from his barons. That is the short answer to the question of what year was the Magna Carta signed. Now, here is where people routinely go wrong with it. If you are writing a paper or just trying to settle a pub argument, 1215 is the date you want. But a lot of people don't realize that the Magna Carta wasn't actually "signed" in the way we think of signatures today. It was sealed. John put his royal seal on it, which was the legal equivalent of a signature in thirteenth-century England. The barons didn't sign it either. This distinction matters because when historians reference the Magna Carta, they are usually talking about the 1215 version, but there were actually four different issues of it during John's reign alone. The 1215 one was the original. It was annulled by Pope Innocent III six weeks after it was issued, which caused the First Barons' War. The later reissues in 1216, 1217, and 1225 are what actually stuck and formed the basis of English common law going forward. I ran into this exact problem once when someone sent me a citation from a legal database that referenced "Magna Carta, 16 Uares 1 (John 1215)." The citation looked official, but the year format was throwing me off because some editions list it as 1216 depending on whether you follow the old style where the new year started on March 25th or the modern reckoning. In practice, I just flagged it with the client and moved on. These dating discrepancies show up more often than you would expect when you are dealing with medieval documents in modern legal research.
The 1215 charter had sixty-three clauses. Only three of them are still on the statute book in England today. Clause 39, the one about no free man being seized or imprisoned except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land, is the famous one. Clause 40, about selling, denying, or delaying right or justice, is the second. Clause 63, which basically said the church should be free, is the third. Everything else has been repealed over the centuries. People often assume the whole thing is still active law, which it isn't. Most of it dealt with very specific feudal grievances about scutage payments, inheritance dues, and the powers of justiciars. Those problems don't exist anymore, so the clauses went away. There is also a common misconception that the Magna Carta was some grand democratic document. It wasn't. It was a peace treaty between a weak king and his very powerful barons. It protected feudal rights, not human rights. The "liberties" it granted applied to free men, which in 1215 meant maybe ten percent of the population. Serfs and villeins got absolutely nothing out of it. The idea that it was a foundational text for modern democracy came later, centuries afterward, when lawyers like Edward Coke revived it during the Stuart period to argue against royal prerogative. That rebranding is what gave it the reputation it has today. Another thing worth knowing: there are four surviving original copies of the 1215 Magna Carta. Two are at the British Library, one at Lincoln Cathedral, and one at Salisbury Cathedral. The Salisbury one is widely considered the best preserved. If you are ever curious about looking at an actual original, that is the one to see. The others have been through enough damage and restoration to make their legibility variable. The British Library copies were damaged during the nineteenth century when they were folded in a way the parchment wasn't designed for.
The Latin text uses the phrase "Magna Carta" itself, which literally means "Great Charter." The full title in Latin is Magna Carta Liberatum, though that second word is sometimes rendered as "Libertas." The document was written in Latin, not English, which makes sense since Latin was the language of law and administration at the time. A translated version in Norman French was also issued alongside it, probably to make it understandable to the barons who dominated the court. So to circle back: the answer to what year was the Magna Carta signed is 1215, specifically June 15th, at Runnymede, under seal rather than signature, and it was immediately pulled apart by the Pope before it even had time to settle into any real legal authority. The versions that survived were the reissues. That is the complete picture and it is more complicated than most people realize when they look it up.
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