County Cornwall Major settlement Saltash Replaced by East Cornwall | Major settlements Saltash Number of members 2 | |
Saltash, sometimes called Essa, was a "rotten borough" in Cornwall which returned two Members of Parliament to the House of Commons in the English and later British Parliament from 1552 to 1832, when it was abolished by the Great Reform Act.
History
The borough consisted of the town of Saltash, a market town facing Plymouth and Devonport across the Tamar estuary, and the inhabitants by 1831 were mainly fishermen or Devonport dockworkers. Like most of the Cornish boroughs enfranchised or re-enfranchised during the Tudor period, it was a rotten borough from the start.
Saltash was a burgage borough, meaning that the right to vote rested with the tenants of certain specified properties. For a long period in the 18th century, there was a contest for control of the borough between the government and the Buller family of Morval, depending partly on legal uncertainties over the precise number and identity of the burgage properties to which votes were attached. In the 1760s it was considered an entirely secure Admiralty borough, where the naval influence could sway all the voters, but by 1831 the Bullers owned all the tenancies and considered themselves the patrons.
In 1831, the borough had a population of 1,637, and 245 houses.