Today, America bids farewell to the Magna Carta. The 800-year old document returns home to Lincolnshire, England, after six months in America. It landed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in July, and spent the past few months at the Library of Congress.

This copy of the Magna Carta visited here once before when England asked the United States to safeguard it from Nazi bombs. But we should not expect to see the Lincoln Magna Carta on these shores again. It is one of only four surviving copies of the 1215 charter, and it shows its 800 years of age. The parchment will be preserved in a newly constructed, high-tech, protective case in Lincoln Castle.