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 99 

 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 

 hond-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 in it." 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 



