Norfolk constituency

Norfolk
Former County constituency for the House of Commons
1290–1832
Number of members	two

Norfolk was a County constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of England then of the Parliament of Great Britain from 1707 to 1800 and of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1832. It was represented by two Members of Parliament. In 1832 the county was divided for parliamentary purposes into two new two member divisions – East Norfolk and West Norfolk.

The constituency consisted of the historic county of Norfolk in the East of England, excluding the city of Norwich which had the status of a county in its itself after 1404. (Although Norfolk contained four other parliamentary boroughs – Castle Rising, Great Yarmouth, King's Lynn and Thetford – each of which elected two MPs in its own right for part of the period when Norfolk was a constituency, these were not excluded from the county constituency: owning property within a borough could confer a vote at the county election. This was not the case, though, for Norwich.)

As in other county constituencies the franchise between 1430 and 1832 was defined by the Forty Shilling Freeholder Act, which gave the right to vote to every man who possessed freehold property within the county valued at £2 or more per year for the purposes of land tax; it was not necessary for the freeholder to occupy his land, nor even in later years to be resident in the county at all.

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