Potwalloper

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"A Pot-Walloper," Times cartoon of 1830: one politician addresses the scruffily-attired peasant voter, "The people of Britain possess the power to return an independent parliament if they will but exert it, think of that my noble pot-walloper"; on the right, another candidate says "Never mind Him I'll give you something to put in your pot," reflecting fears that poor voters would be easily bribed. A pot-walloper (BM 1868,0808.9198).jpg
"A Pot-Walloper," Times cartoon of 1830: one politician addresses the scruffily-attired peasant voter, "The people of Britain possess the power to return an independent parliament if they will but exert it, think of that my noble pot-walloper"; on the right, another candidate says "Never mind Him I'll give you something to put in your pot," reflecting fears that poor voters would be easily bribed.

A potwalloper (sometimes potwalloner or potwaller) or householder borough was a parliamentary borough in which the franchise was extended to the male head of any household with a hearth large enough to boil a cauldron (or "wallop a pot"). [1]

Contents

Potwallopers existed in the Unreformed House of Commons prior to the Reform Act 1832, and in its predecessors the Irish House of Commons and House of Commons of Great Britain (until 1800) and the House of Commons of England (to 1707). [1]

Compared to other types of franchise used by unreformed House of Commons constituencies, potwalloper franchises generally resulted a larger proportion of the population of the borough having the right to vote.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century there was a tendency to try and limit the number of eligible electors in potwalloper boroughs by either changing to another franchise completely or by disenfranchising poorer householders by excluding people supported by the parish through outdoor relief from voting.

English potwalloper boroughs

From the time of the Restoration, the only English boroughs to elect on a potwalloper or inhabitant franchise were:

Irish potwalloper boroughs

There were eleven such boroughs in Ireland until the Union with Great Britain in 1801. Ireland also had seven "manor boroughs", in which only freeholders voted. [1] The potwallopers included Baltimore, Lisburn, Antrim, Swords and Downpatrick, and before Emancipation only non-Roman Catholics could vote. [2]

Quotation

When Thomas Babington Macaulay complained about the insufficiencies of the suffrage system in the early 19th century, he wrote :

"This is an aristocracy, the principle of which is to invest a hundred drunken potwallopers in one place, or the owner of a ruined hovel in another with powers which are withheld from cities renowned in the furthest ends of the earth."

Thomas Hardy, in his first novel, Desperate Remedies , used the term to mean a kind of petit-bourgeois vulgarian:[ citation needed ]

"Ancient pot-wallopers, and thriving shopkeepers, in their intervals of leisure, stood at their shop doors – their toes hanging over the edge of the step, and their obese waists hanging over their toes – and in discourses with friends on the pavement, formulated the course of the improvident, and reduced the children's prospects to a shadow-like attenuation." [3]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Edward Porritt, A. M. Kelley, The Unreformed House of Commons: Scotland and Ireland (1963), pp. 348, 354
  2. Hugh Shearman, Modern Ireland (1952), p. 30
  3. Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (1889, Ward and Downey, London), p. 12

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