Magna Carta, signed by King John 800 years ago on Monday, laid the groundwork for the modern state, imposing the first limits on the monarch’s power. Now the true extent of the role the church played in sending its message across Britain has been uncovered by academics studying the four surviving copies of the parchments.

After scrutinising the handwriting, researchers working on the University of East Anglia and King’s College London’s Magna Carta Project are convinced that the Lincoln and Salisbury charters were written by religious scribes working outside the court. This means the famous Runnymede deal was backed by England’s bishops, as much as by the rebel barons whom John was hoping to appease.

Scholars believe the Lincoln charter was written by a scribe working for the Bishop of Lincoln, while the Salisbury charter was done by a scribe working for the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury.

“To have found and identified the work of these scribes... is the equivalent of finding needles in a very large haystack,” said medieval history professor Nicholas Vincent, principal investigator on the project. “But it also has important historical implications.”

Four original charters bearing the Magna Carta text are known to have survived. Two of these 1215 charters are held at the British Library, one is at Lincoln cathedral and one at Salisbury cathedral. All four have Unesco World Heritage status.

“King John had no real intention that the charter be either publicised or enforced. It was the bishops, instead, who insisted that it be distributed to the country at large and thereafter who preserved it in their cathedral archives,” said Vincent.

“We now find at least two cathedral churches, Lincoln and Salisbury, each producing its own Magna Carta, supplying the time, the scribe and the initiative to get the document copied.

“Bizarrely enough, Magna Carta is the product of a situation far closer to that which elsewhere in today’s world we might associate with the enemies of modern liberal democracy, with Sharia law or with those systems in which church and state are indistinguishable.”