Comment by llm_nerd

>>Harvard Law School bought its version from a London legal book dealer, Sweet & Maxwell, which had in turn purchased the manuscript in December 1945 from Sotheby’s, the auctioneers.

>>In the 1945 auction catalog it was listed as a copy and with the wrong date (1327) and was sold for £42 — about a fifth of the average annual income in the United Kingdom at the time — on behalf of Forster Maynard, an Air Vice-Marshal who had served as a fighter pilot in World War I.

>>Air Vice-Marshal Maynard inherited it from the family of Thomas and John Clarkson, who were leading campaigners in Britain against the slave trade from the 1780s onward.

Pretty convoluted path to launder stolen goods.