Royal charter in the context of Mkhedruli script

Magna Carta (Medieval Latin for "Great Charter"), sometimes spelled Magna Charta, is a royal charter of rights sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons who demanded that the King confirm the Charter of Liberties, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift and impartial justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood by their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War.

After John's death, the regency government of his young son, Henry III, reissued the document in 1216, stripped of some of its more radical content, in an unsuccessful bid to build political support for their cause. At the end of the war in 1217, it formed part of the peace treaty agreed at Lambeth, where the document acquired the name "Magna Carta", to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest, which was issued at the same time. Short of funds, Henry reissued the charter again in 1225 in exchange for a grant of new taxes. His son, Edward I, repeated the exercise in 1297, this time confirming it as part of England's statute law. However, Magna Carta was not unique; other legal documents of its time, both in England and beyond, made broadly similar statements of rights and limitations on the powers of the Crown. The charter became part of English political life and was typically renewed by each monarch in turn. As time went by and the fledgling Parliament of England passed new laws, it lost some of its practical significance.

Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This society received a royal charter in 1783, allowing for its expansion.

King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London. It is one of the oldest university-level institutions in England. In the late 20th century, King's grew through a series of mergers, including with Queen Elizabeth College and Chelsea College of Science and Technology (1985), the Institute of Psychiatry (1997), the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals and the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery (in 1998).

King's operates across five main campuses: the historic Strand Campus in central London, three other Thames-side campuses (Guy's, St Thomas' and Waterloo) nearby, and a campus in Denmark Hill in south London. It also has a presence in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, for professional military education, and in Newquay, Cornwall, which is where King's information service centre is based. The academic activities are organised into nine faculties, which are subdivided into numerous departments, centres, and research divisions. In 2023/24, King's reported total income of £1.271 billion, of which £256.9 million was from research grants and contracts. It has the fourth largest endowment of any university in the UK, and the largest of any in London. King's is the sixth-largest university in the UK by total enrolment and receives over 68,000 undergraduate applications per year.

University College London, which operates as UCL, is a public research university in London, England. It is a member institution of the federal University of London, and is the second-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and the largest by postgraduate enrolment.

Established in 1826 as London University (although without university status or degree-awarding powers) by founders who were inspired by the radical ideas of Jeremy Bentham, UCL was the first university institution to be established in London, and the first in England to be entirely secular and to admit students regardless of their religion. It was also, in 1878, among the first university colleges to admit women alongside men, two years after University College, Bristol, had done so. Intended by its founders to be England's third university, politics forced it to accept the status of a college in 1836, when it received a royal charter and became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London, although it achieved de facto recognition as a university in the 1990s and formal university status in 2023. It has grown through mergers, including with the Institute of Ophthalmology (in 1995), the Institute of Neurology (in 1997), the Royal Free Hospital Medical School (in 1998), the Eastman Dental Institute (in 1999), the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (in 1999), the School of Pharmacy (in 2012) and the Institute of Education (in 2014).

The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree-awarding examination board for students holding certificates from University College London, King's College London, and "other such institutions, corporate or unincorporated, as shall be established for the purpose of Education, whether within the Metropolis or elsewhere within our United Kingdom". It is one of three institutions to have claimed the title of the third-oldest university in England. It moved to a federal structure with constituent colleges in 1900. It is now incorporated by its fourth (1863) royal charter and governed by the University of London Act 2018 (c. iii).

The university consists of 17 member institutions and three central academic bodies. It has around 48,000 distance learning external students and around 205,400 campus-based internal students, making it the largest university by number of students in the United Kingdom. For most practical purposes, ranging from admissions to funding, the member institutions operate on an independent basis, with many conferring their own degrees whilst remaining in the federal university.

The University of Law (founded in 1962 as The College of Law of England and Wales) is a private for-profit university in the United Kingdom, providing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in law, business, psychology, criminology, policing and computer science. It also provides postgraduate courses in education, and specialist legal training and continuing professional development courses for British barristers, solicitors and trainees; it is the United Kingdom's largest law school. It traces its origins to 1876.

The College of Law had been incorporated by royal charter as a charity in 1975, but in 2012, prior to the granting of university status, its educational and training business was split off and incorporated as a private limited company. This became The College of Law Limited and later The University of Law Limited. The college was granted degree-awarding powers in 2006, and in 2012 changed its name to The University of Law (ULaw) when it became the UK's first for-profit educational institution to be granted university status.

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) (/ˈrɑːdə/), is a drama school in London, England, which provides vocational conservatoire training for theatre, film, television, and radio. It is based in Bloomsbury, Central London, close to the Senate House complex of the University of London, and is a founding member of the Federation of Drama Schools.

RADA is one of the oldest drama schools in the United Kingdom, founded in 1904 by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. It moved to buildings on Gower Street in 1905. It was granted a royal charter in 1920 and a new theatre was built on Malet Street, behind the Gower Street buildings, which was opened in 1921 by Edward, Prince of Wales. It received its first government subsidy in 1924. RADA currently has five theatres and a cinema. The school's principal industry partner is Warner Bros. Entertainment.

The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, recognising excellence in science, supporting outstanding science, providing scientific advice for policy, education and public engagement and fostering international and global co-operation. Founded on 28 November 1660, it was granted a royal charter by King Charles II and is the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world.

The society is governed by its Council, which is chaired by the society's president, according to a set of statutes and standing orders. The members of Council and the president are elected from and by its Fellows, the basic members of the society, who are themselves elected by existing Fellows. As of 2020, there are about 1,700 fellows, allowed to use the postnominal title FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society), with up to 73 new fellows appointed each year from a pool of around 800 candidates. There are also royal fellows, honorary fellows and foreign members. Up to 24 new foreign members are appointed each year (from the same pool of 800) and they are allowed to use the postnominal title ForMemRS (Foreign Member of the Royal Society). The Royal Society president is Adrian Smith, who took up the post and started his five-year term on 30 November 2020, replacing the previous president, Venki Ramakrishnan.

Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a private Ivy League research university in New York City, New York, United States. It was first established in 1754 as King's College by royal charter under George II of Great Britain on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan.

The university was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the American Revolution, and in 1787 was placed under a private board of trustees headed by former students Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In 1896, the campus was moved to its current location and renamed Columbia University. It is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States.

The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the world's third-oldest university in continuous operation. The university's founding followed the arrival of scholars who left the University of Oxford for Cambridge after a dispute with local townspeople. The two ancient English universities, although sometimes described as rivals, share many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge.

In 1231, 22 years after its founding, the university was recognised with a royal charter, granted by King Henry III. The University of Cambridge includes 31 semi-autonomous constituent colleges and more than 150 academic departments, faculties, and other institutions organised into six schools. The largest department is Cambridge University Press and Assessment, which contains the oldest university press in the world, with £1 billion of annual revenue and with 100 million learners. All of the colleges are self-governing institutions within the university, managing their own personnel and policies, and all students are required to have a college affiliation within the university. Undergraduate teaching at Cambridge is centred on weekly small-group supervisions in the colleges with lectures, seminars, laboratory work, and occasionally further supervision provided by the central university faculties and departments.

The Georgian scripts are the three writing systems used to write the Georgian language: Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli. Although the systems differ in appearance, their letters share the same names and alphabetical order and are written horizontally from left to right. Of the three scripts, Mkhedruli, once the official script of the Kingdom of Georgia and mostly used for the royal charters, is now the standard script for modern Georgian and its related Kartvelian languages, whereas Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri are used only by the Georgian Orthodox Church, in ceremonial religious texts and iconography.

Georgian scripts are unique in their appearance and their exact origin has never been established; however, in strictly structural terms, their alphabetical order largely corresponds to the Greek alphabet, with the exception of letters denoting uniquely Georgian sounds, which are grouped at the end. Originally consisting of 38 letters, Georgian is presently written in a 33-letter alphabet, as five letters are obsolete. The number of Georgian letters used in other Kartvelian languages varies. Mingrelian uses 36: thirty-three that are current Georgian letters, one obsolete Georgian letter, and two additional letters specific to Mingrelian and Svan. Laz uses the same 33 current Georgian letters as Mingrelian plus that same obsolete letter and a letter borrowed from Greek for a total of 35. The fourth Kartvelian language, Svan, is not commonly written, but when it is, it uses Georgian letters as utilized in Mingrelian, with an additional obsolete Georgian letter and sometimes supplemented by diacritics for its many vowels.

The Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in Westminster, London, England, is one of the oldest music schools in the United Kingdom, founded in 1822 by John Fane and Nicolas-Charles Bochsa. It received its royal charter in 1830 from King George IV with the support of the first Duke of Wellington.

The academy provides undergraduate and postgraduate training across instrumental performance, composition, jazz, musical theatre and opera, and recruits musicians from around the world, with a student community representing more than 50 nationalities. It is committed to lifelong learning, from Junior Academy, which trains musicians up to the age of 18, through Open Academy community music projects, to performances and educational events for all ages.

The University of Kent (formerly the University of Kent at Canterbury, abbreviated as UKC) is a public research university in Kent, United Kingdom. Founded by royal charter in 1965, Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent served as its first Chancellor.

The university's principal campus occupies 300 acres of land overlooking the World Heritage Site of Canterbury Cathedral, and also maintains a campus in Medway and a postgraduate centre in Paris. The university is international, with students from 158 different nationalities and 41% of its academic and research staff being from outside the United Kingdom. It is a member of the Santander Network of European universities encouraging social and economic development.

The British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spanning all disciplines across the humanities and social sciences and a funding body for research projects across the United Kingdom. The academy is a self-governing and independent registered charity, based at 10–11 Carlton House Terrace in London.

The British Academy is primarily funded with annual government grants. In 2022, £49.3m of its £51.7m of charitable income came from the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy – in the same year it took in around £2.0m in trading income and £0.56m in other income. This funding is expected to continue under the new Department for Business and Trade.

The Privy Council, formally His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, is a formal body of advisers to the sovereign of the United Kingdom. Its members, known as privy counsellors, are mainly senior politicians who are current or former members of either the House of Commons or the House of Lords.

The Privy Council formally advises the sovereign on the exercise of the royal prerogative. The King-in-Council issues executive instruments known as Orders in Council. The Privy Council also holds the delegated authority to issue Orders of Council, mostly used to regulate certain public institutions. It advises the sovereign on the issuing of royal charters, which are used to grant special status to incorporated bodies, and city or borough status to local authorities. Otherwise, the Privy Council's powers have now been largely reserved to its executive committee, the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, which serves as the senior decision-making body of the government. The council is administratively headed by the Lord President of the Council who is a member of the cabinet, and appointed on the advice of the Prime Minister.

The Bayonne Statute (Spanish: Estatuto de Bayona), also called the Bayonne Constitution (Constitución de Bayona) or the Bayonne Charter (Carta de Bayona), was a constitution or a royal charter (carta otorgada) approved in Bayonne, France, 6 July 1808, by Joseph Bonaparte as the intended basis for his rule as king of Spain.

The constitution was Bonapartist in overall conception, with some specific concessions made in an attempt to accommodate Spanish culture. Few of its provisions were ever put into effect: his reign as Joseph I of Spain was largely consumed by continuous conventional and guerrilla war as part of the Peninsular War.

A chartered company is an association with investors or shareholders that is incorporated and granted rights (often exclusive rights) by royal charter (or similar instrument of government) for the purpose of trade, exploration, or colonization, or a combination of these.