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 (p. 080)
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.

[Footnote 108: See p. 23.]

[Footnote 109: Equivalent in present values to L30
or L40.]

[Footnote 110: See p. 23.]

*84. Political Corruption.*--A third fact respecting electoral
conditions in the earlier nineteenth century is the astounding
prevalence of illegitimate political influence and of sheer
corruption. Borough members were very commonly not true
representatives at all, but nominees of peers, of influential
commoners, or of the government. It has been estimated that of the 472
borough members not more than 137 may be regarded as having been in
any proper sense elected. The remainder sat for "rotten" boroughs, or
for "pocket" boroughs whose populations were so meager or so docile
that the borough might, as it were, be carried about in a magnate's
pocket. In the whole of