Potwalloper


A potwalloper or householder borough was a parliamentary borough in which the franchise was extended to the male head of any household with a hearth large enough to boil a cauldron.
Potwallopers existed in the Unreformed House of Commons prior to the Reform Act 1832, and in its predecessors the Irish House of Commons and House of Commons of Great Britain and the House of Commons of England.
The potwalloper was one of the widest variants of the borough franchise and the tendency over the centuries was for the franchise to be limited, reducing the number of electors.

English potwalloper boroughs

From the time of the Restoration, the only English boroughs to elect on a potwalloper or inhabitant franchise were:
There were eleven such boroughs in Ireland until the Union with Great Britain in 1801. Ireland also had seven "manor boroughs", in which only freeholders voted. The potwallopers included Baltimore, Lisburn, Antrim, Swords and Downpatrick, and before Emancipation only non-Roman Catholics could vote.

Quotation

When Thomas Babington Macaulay complained about the insufficiencies of the suffrage system in the early 19th century, he wrote :
"This is an aristocracy, the principle of which is to invest a hundred drunken potwallopers in one place, or the owner of a ruined hovel in another with powers which are withheld from cities renowned in the furthest ends of the earth."
Thomas Hardy, in his first novel, Desperate Remedies, used the term to mean a kind of petit-bourgeois vulgarian:
"Ancient pot-wallopers, and thriving shopkeepers, in their intervals of leisure, stood at their shop doors – their toes hanging over the edge of the step, and their obese waists hanging over their toes – and in discourses with friends on the pavement, formulated the course of the improvident, and reduced the children's prospects to a shadow-like attenuation."