County Durham (UK Parliament constituency)
Because of its semi-autonomous status as a county palatine, Durham had not been represented in Parliament during the medieval period; from 1543 it was the only part of England which elected no MPs.In 1621, Parliament passed a bill to enfranchise the county, but James I refused it the royal assent, as he considered that the House of Commons already had too many members and that some decayed boroughs should be abolished first; a similar bill in 1624 failed to pass the House of Lords.As in other county constituencies, until 1832 the franchise was defined by the Forty Shilling Freeholder Act 1430, which gave the right to vote to every man who possessed freehold property within the county valued at £2 or more per year for the purposes of land tax; it was not necessary for the freeholder to occupy his land, nor even in later years to be resident in the county at all.By the time of the Reform Act 1832, the county had a population of just over 250,000, although this was slightly reduced by the boundary changes which severed the enclaves and made them part of Northumberland or the North Riding of Yorkshire for parliamentary purposes.Although nobody could exert the degree of control over the voters that was common in many boroughs, several of the major local landowners had significant influence, in particular the Vane Earls of Darlington.