Old Sarum (UK Parliament constituency)

Old Sarum
Former Borough constituency for the House of Commons
1295–1832
Number of members	Two

Old Sarum was from 1295 to 1832 a parliamentary constituency of England (until 1707), of Great Britain (until 1800), and finally of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was a so-called 'rotten borough', with an extremely small electorate that was consequently vastly over-represented and could be used by a patron to gain undue influence. The constituency was on the site of what had been the original settlement of Salisbury, known as Old Sarum. The population had moved to New Sarum at the foot of the hill and at a confluence known as the cathedral city of Salisbury in the 14th century. The constituency was abolished under the Reform Act 1832.

Old Sarum was unlike other rotten boroughs in that it had never had a substantial population. In 1295, during the reign of King Edward II, it was given the right to send two members to the House of Commons of England due to the presence of the Cathedral of Old Sarum, the former seat of the diocesan bishop. A small hamlet remained, supporting the garrison of the royal castle, but its population steadily declined as the houses were abandoned. The castle was abandoned and sold as scrap by Henry VIII.

The borough was organised with a burgage franchise, meaning that the inhabitants of designated houses (burgage tenements) had the right to vote. From at least the 17th century, Old Sarum had no resident voters, but the landowner retained the right to nominate tenants for each of the burgage plots, and they were not required to live there. For many years, the borough was owned by the Pitt family and was their pocket borough: one of its Members in the late 18th century was William Pitt the Elder. In 1802, the head of the family, Lord Camelford, sold the borough to the Earl of Caledon, who owned it until its abolition; the price was reported as £60,000, even though the land and manorial rights were worth £700 a year at most: an indication of the value of a pair of parliamentary seats. At its final election, in 1831, there were eleven voters, all of whom were landowners who lived elsewhere. This made Old Sarum the most notorious of the rotten boroughs, being described as "a wall with two niches". The Reform Act 1832 subsumed the Old Sarum area into an enlarged borough of Wilton.

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Wikipedia