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Bletchingley (UK Parliament constituency)

Bletchingley
Former Borough constituency
for the House of Commons
County Surrey
Major settlements Bletchingley
1295–1832
Number of members Two
Replaced by East Surrey

Bletchingley was a parliamentary borough in Surrey. It returned two Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons of England from 1295 to 1707, to the House of Commons of Great Britain from 1707 to 1800, and to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom until 1832, when the constituency was abolished by the Great Reform Act.

Elections were held using the bloc vote system.

Bletchingley was one of the original boroughs enfranchised in the Model Parliament, and kept its status until the Reform Act. The borough consisted of the former market town of Bletchingley in Surrey, which by the 19th century had shrunk to a village. In 1831, the population of the borough was 513, and contained only 85 houses. It was a burgage borough, the right to vote being exercised by the owners or resident tenants of the 130 "burgage tenements" - no doubt at some point in history these were simply the inhabited houses of the town, but it was already an artificial franchise by the time it was disputed before the House of Commons in 1624, when it was settled that Bletchingley's burgage holders should keep the vote as they had "time out of mind"; by the 19th century of course, with more burgages in the borough than houses, the notion of its being a residential franchise was no more than a legal fiction.

Like other burgage boroughs, Bletchingley quickly fell into the hands of a single landowner who thereby had the safest of pocket boroughs. It was once the property of Henry VIII's rejected Queen, Anne of Cleves. From her it passed to Sir Thomas Cawarden, the Master of the Revels and from his heir to Lord Howard of Effingham, father of the future conqueror of the Spanish Armada, in about 1560. It then remained in Howard hands for more than half a century, one of several boroughs controlled by that powerful family.


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