An introduction to what happened at a typical eighteenth-century English election [15-minute read] Elections were a key component of a continual cycle of renewing and maintaining relationships between politicians and their constituents in the eighteenth century. The years between elections provided opportunities for politicians and political families to generate goodwill with their local communities through […]
Slavery and abolition could be contentious platform issues in 18th-century England [15-minute read] Understandings of Slavery In eighteenth-century political discourse, ‘slavery’ was a potent but often imprecise term, used across the century to describe many kinds of personal, political or religious oppression rather than specifically the ownership of people as property, as we now generally […]
An introduction to how many people could, and did, vote in the eighteenth century [5-minute read] The ‘electorate’ is the group of individuals who were entitled to vote in an election. This is different from the number of people who actually cast their votes at a poll, a group which we might call the ‘voterate’. […]
‘Minors’, under 21 years old, were not allowed to vote. But did they? [15-minute read] Today, the minimum age for voting in parliamentary elections is set at 18. This was lowered from 21 only in 1969. What is less well known is when limitations on voting age were first introduced. Going back to the early […]
Edmund Green gives the definitive guide to their varieties, formats and contexts [40-minute read] Voting is a means of aggregating individual preferences into collective decisions, and through which the authority to enforce those decisions is legitimated.[1] The point of voting is to have one’s vote counted. This makes the study of historical voting unusual, in […]
The 1807 Yorkshire election was the most expensive prior to the 1832 Reform Act [25-minute read] Context The colossal county of Yorkshire constituted the largest constituency in England by some distance, divided into East, West, and North ridings. The West Riding alone had a population of almost a million people by 1831 (71 per cent […]
Standing as an MP was an expensive undertaking. Success often needed to be bought [15-minute read] The costs of campaigning remain expensive today, as they were in the eighteenth century. Over the course of centuries, however, the types of expenditures have shifted dramatically. In the eighteenth century, food and drink were key for ‘treating’ the […]
Candidates’ processions before and after elections were colourful and noisy events [15-minute read] From the issuing of the writ of election to the chairing of the successful candidates, parliamentary elections were replete with ritual, often long established by precedent within each community. Notably, these rituals included both voters and non-voters alike. Processions in particular were […]
Mark Knights discusses attitudes to bribery and patronage in 18th-century elections [30-minute read] The corruption of electoral politics took two forms: one, of the process of an election itself, and the other, more endemically, of the electoral system as a whole, particularly relating to the prevalence of ‘rotten boroughs’ which enabled the wealthy, the influential […]
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