Note (Back) — Chapter IV

83. County and Borough Franchise in 1831.—Not only was there, thus, the most glaring lack of adjustment of parliamentary representation to the distribution of population; where the right of representation existed, the franchise arrangements under which members were elected were hopelessly heterogeneous and illiberal. Originally, as has been pointed out,[108] the representatives of the counties were chosen in the county court by all persons who were entitled to attend and to take part in the proceedings of that body. In 1429, during the reign of Henry VI., an act was passed ostensibly to prevent riotous and disorderly elections, wherein it was stipulated that county electors should thereafter comprise only such male residents of the county as possessed free land or tenement which would rent for as much as forty shillings a year above all charges.[109] Leaseholders, copyholders, small freeholders, and all non-landholders were denied the suffrage altogether. Even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the number of forty-shilling freeholders was small. With the concentration of land in fewer hands, incident to the agrarian revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it bore an increasingly diminutive ratio to the aggregate county population, and by 1832 the county electors comprised, as a rule, only a handful of large landed proprietors. Within the boroughs the franchise arrangements existing at the date mentioned were complicated and diverse beyond the possibility of general characterization. Many of the boroughs had been accorded parliamentary representation by the most arbitrary and haphazard methods, and at no time prior to 1830 was there legislation which so much as attempted to regulate the conditions of voting within them. There were "scot and lot" boroughs, "potwalloper" boroughs, burgage boroughs, corporation or "close" boroughs, and "freemen" boroughs, to mention only the more important of the types that can be distinguished.[110] In some of these the franchise was, at least in theory, fairly democratic; but in most of them it was restricted by custom or local regulation to petty groups of property-holders or taxpayers, to members of the municipal corporations, or even to members of a favored guild. With few exceptions, the borough franchise was illogical, exclusive, and non-expansive.