Before we speak of Tiverton as an appanage of the Ryders, it will be desirable to glance at the subject of pocket boroughs in general. There are no pocket boroughs or rotten boroughs now, and readers who have bestowed no special attention on political or constitutional developments, may be glad of some measure of illumination as to their rise and their place in the representative system of England. An impression formerly prevailed that the institution dated from the great Revolution, but this, it will be easy to show, was a fallacy. It was much older. On the other hand, the pocket-borough was never substituted by the arbitrary action of the Crown for the open borough, although it was the settled belief of many of the inhabitants of Tiverton that under the provisions of that mighty instrument, Magna Carta, the right of returning members had been inalienably secured to them, and the circumstance that this right was in fact exercised by neighbouring towns, like Barnstaple and Taunton, was considered proof that the local potwallers, or potwallopers, were the victims of invidious and illegal discrimination. “Magna Carta,” said Sir Edward Coke, “is such a fellow that he will not fear an equal”; and if it had been true that open voting in the boroughs had been promulgated as the law of the land after Runnymede, it has been judicially determined that no departure from that principle, brought about by the use of the Royal prerogative or by any other means, would have been recognized as valid. The terms of Magna Carta, however, do not countenance the view that the burgesses of any given town became entitled at their own option to send deputies to Parliament, or that universal suffrage was the rule. On the contrary, Parliamentary representation had at that time no existence either in theory or in practice. The Commons were simply tenants _in capite_ of the Crown. After 1265, no doubt, elections began to be held, and many little places were summoned to return members, who received salaries from their constituencies in payment of their services. This charge rendered the honour a costly burden, and Edward I., one of the wisest of our princes, varied the direction of the writs so as to distribute the maintenance of the new third estate over as wide an area as possible. The towns themselves did not greatly value the franchise, and, in many instances, petitioned to be relieved of the dubious privilege. It seems unquestionable that the mere receipt of an occasional summons did not create or confirm any inherent or indefeasible right of unbroken representation, nor do we meet with any attempt to institute such a system until the days of the Reformation, when a new spirit invaded the country and the Commons, as a branch of the Legislature, made rapid strides in numbers and importance.