【明報專訊】Old Sarum is a hill in Wiltshire, in south-west England. No one has lived on the hill since the 14th century, but it elected two members to the English Parliament for centuries. It is a classic example of a rotten borough. If you were the landowner, you had considerable political power. A member of parliament was in your pocket (meaning under your control), so rotten boroughs were sometimes called pocket boroughs. Compare Old Sarum to the city of Manchester, with more than 100,000 people by the 19th century. It did not have any member of parliament of its own. England reformed their elections and rotten boroughs were abolished by the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867.
