Herefordshire

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This article has not been researched and written yet

Economic and social profile:

Economic and social profile:

While failing to attain the national notoriety achieved by other spectacularly rotten boroughs, Weobley enjoyed a considerable local reputation for venality. The susceptibility of the Weobley voters to bribery was so well known that an elector in Leominster anxious to sell his own vote to the highest bidder could advertise himself as ‘a Weobley man’; while the fondness of the population for alcoholic entertainment led to the description of the town by one candidate as ‘our liquid metropolis’.

As in other boroughs with a scot-and-lot or inhabitant franchise, the electorate in Leominster included numbers of the needy and vulnerable, and contests were usually followed by accusations of bribery and intimidation. A free-for-all was avoided, however, because of the degree of control exercised over voters and voting by the bailiff, magistrates and municipal officers, a powerful local oligarchy alternately engaged in the service of one or other of the principal landowners of the neighbourhood.

Hereford, described by Defoe as ‘large and populous’ but ‘old, mean built and very dirty’, had a ‘popular and numerous’ electorate with a substantial proportion of non-resident freemen, some as far afield as London, a fact that facilitated the domination of the constituency by local magnates, in particular the Foleys of Stoke Edith, the 8th Lord Chandos and, at the beginning of this period, Lords Coningsby (Thomas*) and Scudamore (John†). The interest of the corporation was not insignificant.

Weobley had a complicated franchise, akin to that of a burgage borough. About 1750 the leading interests were in Lord Weymouth, lord of the manor, who nominated the returning officer, and Mansell Powell, a shady attorney, who owned a majority of the vote houses. In the first half of the century the borough was much disputed, and there was a strong party bent on preventing it becoming close. Between 1750 and 1754 Weymouth, by his purchase of Powell’s vote houses, gained a commanding interest; which was confirmed at the general election of 1754.

Hereford was an independent constituency, and preferred local men to strangers. The leading interest was in the Scudamore family, who held at least one seat throughout this period. Next came that of the Symons family. Others who had some interest were Lord Oxford, Lord Bateman, the Cornewalls of Moccas Court, and the Foleys.

At Leominster, which was reputedly very open, several neighbouring landowning families seated within a radius of about five miles from the borough had an interest. The Coningsbys of Hampton Court, whose heiress married Charles Hanbury Williams, had represented Leominster in the first half of the eighteenth century as Whigs, the Harleys as Tories. But no family could obtain a permanent, still less an exclusive, hold on the borough. If at Leominster ‘two brothers were to stand, they must be clear of each other’.Somerset Davies, receiver of the land tax for Shropshire, to Ld.