Corfe Castle was a parliamentary borough in

Dorset Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset (unitary authority), Dors ...

, which elected two

Members of Parliament A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members of ...

(MPs) to the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...

from 1572 until 1832, when it was abolished by the

Great Reform Act The Representation of the People Act 1832 (also known as the 1832 Reform Act, Great Reform Act or First Reform Act) was an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom (indexed as 2 & 3 Will. IV c. 45) that introduced major changes to the electo ...

History

Corfe Castle was made a borough by

Queen Elizabeth I Elizabeth I (7 September 153324 March 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. Elizabeth was the last of the five House of Tudor monarchs and is sometimes referred to as the "Virgin Queen". El ...

, through the influence of

Sir Christopher Hatton Sir Christopher Hatton KG (1540 – 20 November 1591) was an English politician, Lord Chancellor of England and a favourite of Elizabeth I of England. He was one of the judges who found Mary, Queen of Scots guilty of treason. Early years Sir ...

, who had been granted the manor. The borough consisted of the town of

Corfe Castle Corfe Castle is a fortification standing above the village of the same name on the Isle of Purbeck peninsula in the English county of Dorset. Built by William the Conqueror, the castle dates to the 11th century and commands a gap in the P ...

on the

Isle of Purbeck The Isle of Purbeck is a peninsula in Dorset, England. It is bordered by water on three sides: the English Channel to the south and east, where steep cliffs fall to the sea; and by the marshy lands of the River Frome and Poole Harbour to the no ...

, once a market town but by the 19th century little more than a village, where the main economic interests were clay and stone quarrying. In 1831, the population of the borough was approximately 960, in 156 houses. (The portion of the town outside the borough contained another 141 houses.) The right to vote was exercised by all householders (resident or not) paying

scot and lot Scot and lot is a phrase common in the records of English, Welsh and Irish medieval boroughs, referring to local rights and obligations. The term ''scot'' comes from the Old English word ''sceat'', an ordinary coin in Anglo-Saxon times, equivalen ...

; in 1816 this amounted to only 44 voters, and all but 14 of those were non-resident. The local landowners were able to exercise almost total influence. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the Bankes family (who had owned the castle since 1640) nominated the member for one of the seats and the Bond family for the other.Page 146,

Lewis Namier Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (; 27 June 1888 – 19 August 1960) was a British historian of Polish-Jewish background. His best-known works were ''The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III'' (1929), ''England in the Age of the Ameri ...

, ''

The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III ''The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III'' was a book written by Lewis Namier. At the time of its first publication in 1929 it caused a historiographical revolution in understanding the 18th century by challenging the Whig view ...

'' (2nd edition - London: St Martin's Press, 1957) Corfe Castle was abolished as a separate constituency by the Reform Act; however, the nearby borough of Wareham kept one of its MPs, and Corfe Castle was included within the expanded boundaries of the revised Wareham constituency.

Members of Parliament

1572–1640

1640–1832

Notes

References

*Robert Beatson,
A Chronological Register of Both Houses of Parliament
' (London: Longman, Hurst, Res & Orme, 1807) *D. Brunton & D. H. Pennington, ''Members of the Long Parliament'' (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954) *
Cobbett's Parliamentary history of England, from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803
' (London: Thomas Hansard, 1808) * Maija Jansson (ed.), ''Proceedings in Parliament, 1614 (House of Commons)'' (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988) * J. Holladay Philbin, ''Parliamentary Representation 1832 - England and Wales'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) *Henry Stooks Smith, "The Parliaments of England from 1715 to 1847" (2nd edition, edited by

F. W. S. Craig Frederick Walter Scott Craig (10 December 1929 – 23 March 1989) was a Scottish psephologist and compiler of the standard reference books covering United Kingdom Parliamentary election results. He originally worked in public relations, compilin ...

- Chichester: Parliamentary Reference Publications, 1973) * *{{Rayment-hc, c, 5, date=March 2012 Parliamentary constituencies in Dorset (historic) Constituencies of the Parliament of the United Kingdom established in 1572 Constituencies of the Parliament of the United Kingdom disestablished in 1832 Rotten boroughs Corfe Castle