nceforth to purchase their right of
entrance by a long apprenticeship. In addition to this narrowing of the
burgess-body the internal government of the boroughs had almost
universally passed since the failure of the Communal movement in the
thirteenth century from the free gathering of the citizens in borough-mote
into the hands of Common Councils, either self-elected or elected by the
wealthier burgesses; and to these councils, or to a yet more restricted
number of "select men" belonging to them, clauses in the new charters
generally confined the right of choosing their representatives in
Parliament. It was with this restriction that the long process of
degradation began which ended in reducing the representation of our
boroughs to a mere mockery. Influences which would have had small weight
over the town at large proved irresistible by the small body of
corporators or "select men." Great nobles, neighbouring landowners, the
Crown itself, seized on the boroughs as their prey, and dictated the
choice of their representatives. Corruption did whatever force failed to
do: and from the Wars of the Roses to the days of Pitt the voice of the
people had to be looked for not in the members for the towns but in the
knights for the counties.

[Sidenote: Restriction of County Franchise]

The restriction of the county franchise on the other hand was the direct
work of the Parliament itself. Economic changes were fast widening the
franchise in the shires. The number of freeholders increased with the
subdivision of estates and the social changes which we have already
noticed. But this increase of independence was marked by "riots and
divisions between the gentlemen and other people" which the statesmen of
the day attributed to the excessive number of voters. In many counties the
power of the great lords undoubtedly enabled them to control elections
through the number of their retainers. In Cade's revolt the Kentishmen
complained that "the people of the shire are not allowed to have their
free elections in the choosing of knights for the shire, but letters have
been sent from divers estates to the great nobles of the county, the which
enforceth their tenants and other people by force to choose other persons
than the common will is." It was primarily to check this abuse that a
statute of the reign of Henry the Sixth restricted in 1430 the right of
voting in shires to freeholders holding land worth forty shillings, a sum
equal in our