freemen of the borough, or of the guild which was coextensive
with the borough ; the character of a freeman being personal
and not connected with tenure of land or contribution to the
public burdens. A fourth gave the electoral vote to all house-
holders paying scot and lot ; that is, bearing their rateable
proportion in the payments levied from the town for local or
national purposes. A fifth lodged the right in the hands of the
governing body, the corporation; the constitution of which
again varied from comparative freedom in one place to oli-
garchic exclusiveness in another. The newer the constitution
of the town was, the less liberal the constitution seems to have
been, and several places, which must in early times have enjoyed
fairly free institutions, had, by accepting new charters, lost
their liberties, at all events in this particular. As the towns
were constantly purchasing new charters, the perpetual changes
in their constitutions add a further element of difficulty to our
inquiry ; but it is obvious that the tendency to restriction set
in from the first institution of charters of incorporation in the
fifteenth century. The ancient cities of Winchester and Salis-
bury saw their electoral rights confined to the small body of
the corporation, sixty in one and fifty-six in the other ɪ. Old
Sarum retained the burgage franchise, its desolation saving it
from a new charter. Twenty-three persons returned the
members for Bath. But for our purpose no further conclusions
need be drawn from such premises. The antiquity of the
borough was no guarantee for its freedom ; its municipal sym-
metry no security for the soundness of its political machinery.
Aylesbury, a new borough of Mary’s creation, did not even care
to maintain its corporate character, and in the days of Eliza-
beth the lord, or even the lady, of the manor returned the
members². Aldborough and Boroughbridge, two boroughs in

¹ These and the following instances will be found, illustrated by tlɪe
reports of the election committees of the house of commons upon them,
in Browne Willis’s Notitia Parliamentaria, in Carew on Elections, in
the Appendices to the Itoyal Kalendars of the last century, and in
local histories generally. The primary authority of course is the Commons’
J ournals.

² In 1572 Dame Dorothy Packington, lady of the manor, returned
the two members ; Return of Members, p. 407.

the same parish, had different franchises ; scot and lot gave the
right in one, burgage tenure in the other. Both of these were
members of the great liberty of Knaresborough, and that town
also returned two members and retained the burgage vote.
In the Cinque Ports, where at least symmetry might have been
looked for, equal variation is found ; at Hastings, Dover, Sand-
wich, Rye and Seaford, the constitution was open ; at New
Romney, Winchelsea and Hythe, it was closed. These anomalies
grew up in the new boroughs as well as in the old ones : the
older and larger cities, with the exceptions already noted, main-
tained their liberties ; N orwich, Bedford, Reading, Cambridge,
Gloucester, Northampton, Newcastle-On-Tyne, Coventry, and
York, retained the scot and lot franchise. But every borough has
had a history that was all its own ; and some had constitutions
and mixtures of franchise as confused as their obscure history.

423. Medieval history.records little about contested or dis- Casesof
,                                                                                , early dis-

puted elections. In an age when the office of representative pnted eɪee-
was regarded rather as a burden than as a privilege, it is not
surprising to find that contested and disputed returns were
caused rather by the difficulty of finding candidates than by
the rivalry of the competitors themselves. Such was the case
in the early days of parliament ; in 1321 the mayor of Lincoln
writes to the Keeper of the Rolls of parliament, that one of the
two elected members, who had gone so far as to assent to Iiis
election, would not deign to attend the parliament¹. But the
sheriff was generally the person to blame. In 1319 Matthew of τiκ sheriff
Crauthorn, who had been elected by the bishop of Exeter, and Devon, °
Sir William Martyn, by the assent of the other good people of
the county, to be knight of the shire for Devon, petitioned the
council against the undue return made by the vice-sheriff, who
had substituted another name ; Crauthorn obtained a summons
for the offending officer to answer for the false return in the Ex-
chequer². In 1323 it was alleged by the grand jury of West and Lanca-
Derby wapentake that William le Gentil, when sheriff, had

¹ Part. Writs, IT. i. 252. They had elected Henry de Hakethorn and
Thomas Gamel ; Thomas would ‘ ne se deygne venir pur riens que nous
savons faire ; ’ so they had chosen Alan of Huddleston instead.

² Prynne, 4th Xnst. p. 31 ; Hallam, Middle Ages, iii. 109.

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