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Tregony (UK Parliament constituency)
Former parliamentary constituency in the United Kingdom From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Tregony was a rotten borough in Cornwall represented in the Model Parliament of 1295. It continuously returned two Members of Parliament to the English, and later British, Parliament from 1562[1] to 1832, when it was abolished by the Great Reform Act.
History
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The borough consisted of the town of Tregony. Like most Cornish boroughs enfranchised or re-enfranchised during the Tudor period, it was a settlement of little initial importance or wealth. It was not incorporated as a municipal borough until sixty years after it began to return members to Parliament in 1563.
Tregony was a potwalloper borough, meaning every male householder with a separate fireplace capable of boiling a pot was entitled to vote. The apparently democratic nature of this arrangement was a delusion in a borough as small and poor as Tregony, where the residents could not afford to defy their landlord and regarded their vote as a means of income. Many of the houses in the borough were built purely for political purposes, and the borough itself was bought and sold for its political value on numerous occasions. In the 1760s, Viscount Falmouth (head of the Boscawen family) influenced the nomination to one of the two seats[2] and William Trevanion the other;[3] later the Earl of Darlington controlled both seats, together with others in Cornwall, but by the time of the Great Reform Act, the patronage had been transferred again to James Adam Gordon.
In 1831, the borough's population was 1,127, and 234 houses. Nevertheless, because of the wide franchise it had a comparatively large electorate for the time, numbering between 260 and 300 voters.
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Members of Parliament
MPs 1559–1629
MPs 1640–1832
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Notes
References
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