Typically, rotten boroughs had gained their representation in Parliament when they were more flourishing centres, but the borough's boundaries had never been updated, or else they had become depopulated or even deserted over the centuries.
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Many such rotten boroughs were controlled by landowners and peers who might give the seats in Parliament to their like-minded friends or relations, or who went to Parliament themselves, if they were not already members of the House of Lords.
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Pocket Rotten boroughs were Rotten boroughs which could effectively be controlled by a single person who owned at least half of the "burgage tenements", the occupants of which had the right to vote in the borough's parliamentary elections.
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Pocket Rotten boroughs were seen by their 19th-century owners as a valuable method of ensuring the representation of the landed interest in the House of Commons.
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Significantly diminished by the Reform Act 1832, pocket Rotten boroughs were for all practical purposes abolished by the Reform Act of 1867.
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The Reform movement had a major success in the Reform Act 1832, which disfranchised the 56 Rotten boroughs listed below, most of them in the south and west of England.
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Some MPs claimed that the Rotten boroughs should be retained, as Britain had enjoyed periods of prosperity while they were part of the constitution of Parliament.
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British colonists in the West Indies and British North America, and those in the Indian subcontinent, had no representation of their own at Westminster, representatives of these groups often claimed that rotten boroughs provided opportunities for virtual representation in Parliament for colonial interest groups.
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Tory politician Spencer Perceval asked the nation to look at the system as a whole, saying that if pocket Rotten boroughs were disenfranchised, the whole system was liable to collapse.
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Rotten boroughs Borough was a controversial story published by Oliver Anderson under the pen name Julian Pine in 1937, republished in 1989.
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Rotten boroughs easily accomplished this with a result of 16,472 to nil, even though the constituency had only one voter.
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