been resident for 40 days previously) of so-called “vote houses”. The annual rental value of such a property had to be £1 or over, and the occupier had to pay scot and lot which, in practice, meant the parish poor rate since there was no borough corporation. However, after this the Lord of the Manor, Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth (later first Marquess of Bath) instructed the constables not to register for the poor rate any resident who would not promise to vote for his candidates. This was disfranchisement, and the aggrieved voters took their case to the King's Bench. They lost, and thus Weobley became a pocket borough under the control of the Thynne family. To make sure of matters, Weymouth bought the vote houses that he didn't already own. In 1830, a House of Commons report gave the number of vote houses in 1821 as 93, but with only 81 occupiers. Allegedly the Marquess had been keeping vote houses empty until forty days before an election, when he would have temporary tenants installed who would vote obediently. 19th century The manufacture of gloves at Weobley received a boost at the start of the 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars, because imports of fine French gloves were stopped. At this time, the town was still famous for beer (“malt liquor”, so it was not hopped). Quarries of building stone and roadstone were in the vicinity”. There was a direct turnpike road to Hereford, the present Hereford Road. At this time, the ancient fair on 3 May had been replaced by one on Maundy Thursday for “horned cattle” (i.e. not calves) and horses, and also on the Thursday three weeks later for the same and “coarse linen cloth”. In 1807 the castellated mansion of Garnstone Castle was built by John Nash. The parliamentary borough was disfranchised by the Reform Act 1832. Since there was no town council, administratively the place became a village. Despite this it was chosen as the headquarters of the local poor law union, and a workhouse was opened at Whitehill on the road to Kington in 1837. A Roman Catholic church was opened in 1834, and a Primitive Methodist congregation gathered in 1839 and built a chapel in 1844 (the present structure opened in 1861). To supplement the old Grammar School, the National Society for Promoting Religious Education opened a National School in 1834. However, the town