In 1295, during the reign of
King Edward I, Old Sarum was given the right to send two members to the
House of Commons of England even though the site had ceased to be a city with the dissolution of
Old Sarum Cathedral in 1226. The remains of the old settlement were razed for its materials that were used to construct the new city and Salisbury Cathedral. Evidence of quarrying showed it continued well into the 14th century. Two hundred years later
Henry VIII sold the former Royal Castle to Thomas Compton. Despite having no significant population, the borough was organised with a
burgage franchise, meaning that the inhabitants of designated houses (burgage tenements) had the right to vote. From at least the 17th century, Old Sarum had no resident voters, but the landowner retained the right to nominate tenants for each of the burgage plots, and they were not required to live there. For many years, the borough was owned by the Pitt family and was their
pocket borough: one of its Members in the late 18th century was
William Pitt the Elder. In 1802, the head of the family,
Lord Camelford, sold the borough to the
Earl of Caledon, who owned it until its abolition; the price was reported as £60,000, even though the land and manorial rights were worth £700 a year at most: an indication of the value of a pair of parliamentary seats. At its final election, in 1831, there were eleven voters, all of whom were landowners who lived elsewhere. This made Old Sarum the most notorious of the rotten boroughs, being described as "a wall with two niches". The
Reform Act 1832 subsumed the Old Sarum area into an enlarged borough of
Wilton. In the last years, the spectacle of an Old Sarum election drew a small crowd to observe the ritual presentation of the two candidates and the hollow call for any further nominations. Stooks Smith quotes a contemporary description dating from the
1802 general election:
Place of election Elections in Old Sarum were conducted on a mobile
hustings under a specific tree, which died in 1905, in what was known as the "electing acre". ==Members of Parliament==