Throughout the eighteenth century, in some parts of England, a man was allowed to vote in the parliamentary elections so long as he was the head of his own household, and not simply a member of another man’s household. Householder eligibility was determined in turn by whether the man had his own fireplace where he could boil soup in his own pot. The name potwaller arose to describe such eligible householders, a term derived by compounding pot with the Old English verb wall, meaning to boil (this Old English wall is not related to the wall in wallpaper, but it is related to the word wallow). The advantage of being recognized as a “pot-boiler” was not so much that you got to vote, as that you were given money by candidates who wanted your vote. Accordingly, scurrilous men who headed no household would sometimes get themselves declared potwallers by setting up a little fire pit in the street and boiling a pot of soup in the presence of witnesses; the Reform Act of 1832 put an end to this flagrant abuse of kitchen utensils.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Throughout the eighteenth century, in some parts of England, a man was allowed to vote in the parliamentary elections so long as he was the head of his own household, and not simply a member of another man’s household. Householder eligibility was determined in turn by whether the man had his own fireplace where he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-p"],"yoast_head":"\n