Callington (UK Parliament constituency)

Callington
Former Borough constituency for the House of Commons
1585–1832
Number of members	Two
Replaced by	East Cornwall

Callington was a rotten borough in Cornwall which returned two Members of Parliament to the House of Commons in the English and later British Parliament from 1585 to 1832, when it was abolished by the Reform Act 1832.

The borough consisted of most of the town of Callington in the East of Cornwall. Callington was the last of the Cornish rotten boroughs to be enfranchised, returning its first members in 1585; like most of the Cornish boroughs enfranchised or re-enfranchised during the Tudor period, it was a rotten borough from the start, and was never substantial enough to have a mayor and corporation.

The right to vote in Callington was disputed until a decision of the House of Commons in 1821 settled it as resting with "freeholders of the borough and ... life-tenants of freeholders, resident for 40 days before the election and rated to the poor at 40 shillings or more". This considerably enlarged the electorate, for there had been only 42 voters in the borough in 1816, but the Parliamentary return of 1831 reported that 225 were qualified. In the 18th century the power of the "patron" to influence the voters in Callington was considered absolute. In 1831 the borough had a population of 1,082, and 225 houses; the part of the town outside the borough boundaries contained only a further eight houses, leaving no scope to enlarge it. It was disfranchised by the Great Reform Act in 1832.

The two patrons of the pocket borough of Callington were the Rolle family of Heanton Satchville, Petrockstowe, Devon (a junior branch of the Rolle family of Stevenstone and Bicton in Devon) and the Coryton family of the adjacent manor of St. Mellion, Cornwall.

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