[1] The qualification to vote using the ownership and value of property, and the creation of a group of forty-shilling freeholders, was practiced in many jurisdictions such as England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States of America, Australia, and Canada.

Henry III rejected the new Parliament and resumed his war against Montfort, who was killed later that year at the Battle of Evesham, but the idea of electing knights of the shire as representatives of the counties, and burgesses from the boroughs, became a permanent feature.

[5] Until legislation in the fifteenth century the franchise for elections of knights of the shire to serve as the representatives of counties in the Parliament of England was not restricted to forty-shilling freeholders.

After the Restoration the electoral rights of clergymen were recognised by statute and church offices were held to confer a county franchise; this interpretation widened commensurately with the financial possibilities and value of a vote.

A chorister of Ely Cathedral, the butler and brewer of Westminster Abbey, the bell-ringer, the gardener, the cook and the organ-blower, all voted by virtue of their supposedly ecclesiastical offices.

The Whigs pointed out this had always been the case with urban areas not previously represented as borough constituencies (which had included major centres of wealth and population like Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester as well as the rapidly growing suburbs of London).

Universal adult suffrage was enacted in 1928 and the remaining plural votes were abolished by the Representation of the People Act 1948 so that by and since the 1950 United Kingdom general election no voters have qualified on the basis of the ownership of land.

This eliminated the middling tenantry who had risked much in defying their landlords on Daniel O'Connell's behalf in the 1828 Clare by-election that helped finally force the issue of Catholic access to Parliament, and it reduced the overall electorate in the country from 216,000 voters to just 37,000.

[8][9] O'Connell's erstwhile ally in Ulster, George Ensor predicted as the price for allowing "a few Catholic gentlemen to be returned to Parliament", the sacrifice of the forty-shilling freeholder and "indifference" it demonstrated to the cause of parliamentary reform would prove "disastrous" for the country.

But the ten-pound threshold remained the basis of the county franchise in Ireland until the Representation of the People Act 1884 which extended the same voting qualifications as existed in the towns to the countryside.