a member. The county franchise was the forty shilling freehold; it therefore excluded not only those who had no connection with the land, but the copyholder—who was really a landowner, but whose tenure was regarded as base, on account of his villein origin. This copyholder was undoubtedly the descendant of the Welsh serf of mediæval times.
The first Reform Act, that of 1832, was won for the great manufacturing towns of England, but Wales benefited by it. It extended the franchise to the copyholder, and to the farmer paying £50 rent, in the counties; it gave the towns a uniform £10 household franchise. It also brought many of the towns into the system of representation. It raised the number of members from twenty-seven to thirty-two; the agricultural districts getting two, and the mining districts two.
The slight change in representation is a recognition of the growing industries of the country, especially in the coal and iron districts. The coal of the great coalfield of South Wales had been worked as far back as Norman times; but it was in the nineteenth century that the coal and iron industries of South Wales, and the coal
