172 Swindon and its Neighbourhood—No. 2. 
‘* pot-walloppers.” There has been some discussion as to what that 
word really means. To the ear, at first sound, like the word pot- 
valiant, it conveys the idea of being connected with that source of 
so much vulgarity and misery, the drinking pot. ‘ Wallopping ” 
is also a vulgar word, the meaning of which is only too well under- 
stood by the tyrants of poor donkeys. But the word pot-wallopper 
has really nothing whatever to do either with the beer-pot or with 
beating. The real word was pot-waller, and a pot-waller was 
simply a person who was the owner of a house with a pot-wall—in 
other words a kitchen fireplace for cookery. A wall of that kind 
is rather an important one in any house, and in a house without it 
no one would be likely to stay very long. A kitchen fireplace, 
therefore, always implies housekeeping, and any person who was. the 
bond-fide owner of such an apartment as a kitchen was a housekeeper 
qualified to vote. A lodger might have ten times the intellect of 
the owner, but he had no vote, because he was not the proprietor of 
the pot-wall. The word pot-waller is formally used in this par- 
ticular sense in one of the Reports of a Committee of the House of 
Commons sitting upon an election petition. The committee resolved 
that a potwaller should be “a person who, having a legal parochial 
settlement, should possess the means of providing in his own house 
diet for all who might be init.” In Scotland, where the houses 
are very high, and divided into flats, each flat having its own kitchen 
fireplace and potwall, every kitchen conferred a separate vote. 
But these cooking vessels that hung about the wall were now and 
then applied to other purposes than those for which they were 
intended by the ironmonger. On the eve of an election, when a 
visit from the candidate was expected, if the voter had an eye for 
money, and intended to have it, he put an empty pot in the fireplace, 
and went and looked at the view out of the window. Somehow or 
other, after the candidate had taken his leave, the vacuum was 
found to be filled, not with a trussed fowl, or bit of beef, but with 
ample means of procuring either or both. 
All this was put an end to in 1832, when Wootton Basset and 
six more Wiltshire boroughs were quietly snuffed out. 
Though all these ways of supplying Members of Parliament were 
