For long there has been accepted as genuine a charter, purporting to be issued by Henry III, which follows the text of his first reissue of the Great Charter in favour of his English subjects but which has been to some extent modified to adapt it to Irish conditions. This document, to which the title Magna Carta Hiberniae has been applied, has received an official cachet by its inclusion, with no mark of suspicion, in the first volume of the Early statutes of Ireland, edited by H. F. Berry. In undertaking a careful enquiry into the transmission of the text and its historical background, Dr. Dudley Edwards has performed a valuable service and, as a result, the authenticity of the supposed charter is, at least, very much open to question. He might, indeed, have gone further than he has done and have stated as a positive conclusion his tentative conjecture ‘ that Magna Carta Hiberniae is an adaptation of Henry's first charter, compiled in Ireland ’.
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