-How are you?

-Morning!

Good morning!

Are we ready to rock and roll?

You call it.

Its your day.

Alright.

*laughter* - In 1648, there was a revolution in England and they overthrew Charles the first, and he was executed and the Puritans took over in England.

Oliver Cromwell was their leader, and then he lasted until 1660, I think, and Charles the second was installed back in government.

This made the Puritans in Connecticut very nervous because their government was set up with no authorization from the crown.

They operated under the laws of God.

The general assembly in Connecticut decided that they were going to petition the king for a charter to codify the laws that they had.

The significance, it sets up government and who, who was authorized to be as part of the government.

The general assembly made up of representatives from the various towns.

A governor.

It didn't require any allegiance to the king.

I think the, the interesting to note is that they, that the only thing the king asked for them back was if they found any silver or gold in Connecticut.

They got what they wanted and it was the most liberal charter that was granted to the colonies at that point.

After Charles died and James came in, the decision was made to consolidate and all the New England colonies were notified by the king that they had to turn over their charters to them.

I, I need to say that they sent over two copies of, of the charter.

The second one was just like a certified copy.

Based on the written record, this is not the one that was taken from the tavern and put in the tree.

We have 53,000 cubic feet of, of records in the state archives.

And because of the charter had not had any work done on it since the 1970s.

It had been on continuous display even before it came here.

You know, it had been faded at one point, one of the clerks in the Secretary of State's office re inked it and it been hanging and they're skins and they can sag.

The three sheets were glued together by the secretary's of state's office sometime in the late 1800s and it had a fabric backing.

All the things we would never do to a document like that.

- Obviously, this is a really important document.

It's a really big document.

It has a lot of considerations.

There's actually a very nuanced difference between the term restoration and conservation.

Restoration is kind of an older way of thinking of things where you were restoring an item to what it absolutely originally looked like.

Conservation, especially since like the mid 1900s, 1950s onward, has been a more focus on the stabilization of the objects so that it lasts for the community in the future.

It's not necessarily about making it pretty.

It's on display today, but the state library is going to put it away.

So it's gonna remain in the dark.

It's getting some very well deserved rest.

- The stories that we choose to tell about ourselves tell us who we are and who we aspire to be.

And so I think it is significant that the story of preserving this document has long been and continues to be Connecticut's most frequently told story.

And, and when you take the opportunity to come close as you should and squint at that 363-year-old script, you're gonna encounter ideas that seem quite alien.

The charter imagines that rights are not self-evident, but rather must come from a monarch's grant.

The charter totally ignores this region's indigenous inhabitants.

Lieutenant Governor Bysiewicz the charter would not imagine you or any other woman holding elected office.

With a document that seems to speak to such a different time, if not a different reality.

The question is, why do we care about it at all?

The charter reminds me that these fundamental questions about who is a citizen and what rights are they entitled to and who should decide and how should we decide.

The charter reminds me that these are are never settled questions and that rights that we think secure can be quickly lost.

And liberties that we find to be unimaginably distant can sometimes come within reach.

And the work of self-government is ongoing.