What were the English "Revision Courts"?

[tony vines]

I have a newspaper report of 1892 in which there is a reference to an ancestor in reportage of the Market Harborough "Revision Court". Essentially someone who may have had the title of Overseer was objecting to my ancestor. It is not clear to me what my ancestor was asking for or the overseer was therefore objecting to because his objection was founded on a change of surname rather on any other matter.

I cannot find any reference to Revision Courts or what their business/judicial oversight related to. My historical knowledge of the period in question is woeful. Can anyone throw any light on what might have been going on please?

[tony vines]

After further reading of the newspaper it may be that the so-called "Revision Court" was considering whether to include or exclude persons from the Electoral Rolls. After the reference to my ancestor there is a list of "Gains and Losses" by the "Unionists" and "Gladstonians", which parties also joined in the fray on occasions. My reference to an overseer is probably incorrect. It seems that there was an "agent" whose job it was to weed out those people who he felt were not entitled to a vote. Another agent would act for the party being objected to and the court was presided over by a Revision Barrister. Entitlement to vote appears to have been partly related to property occupation/ownership in the constituency as well as to being at least 21.

I am not 100% clear that I now have it about right so would still appreciate any expert comments on any of the above.

[christanel]

Hi tony
I did take a look at this earlier but the only references I could find seem to be in reference to the present day and define the differences between a revision court and an appeal court.
Christina

[Megan Roberts]

I've not come across the expression before and when I searched the National Archives to see if they had and any information that drew a blank.

However some indirect references come up in terms of "courts" and "revision" which leads you to things such as the now extinct Memorial Courts, who amongst other things dealt in property matters, such as revising boundaries.

In the 1890s men did not have a universal right to vote. This was still still determined by property and it's thought more than 40% of men aged 21 plus remained without the vote after the Representation of the People Act 1884.

So I wonder whether your ancestor was involved in some kind of boundary case and it went to what was known in common parlance the Revision Court?

I am of course purely speculating.

[Peter Goodey]

Several references come up with a search engine (I tried DuckDuckGo and Google) and they all refer to the franchise.

Suggested search term "revision court" site:.uk

Also try old newspapers. There's a "things ain't like they used to be" article in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette of 9 March 1929.

[tony vines]

Thank you all for your replies. Learning something new about the life and times of our ancestors is the great bonus our hobby brings with it. In this case the ancestor in question was my paternal grandfather. The objection to his inclusion on the electoral roll (because that seems to have been what the hearings were about) was because he had applied in what appeared to be a new surname to the agent opposing his application - indeed the agent mocked him for not seeming to know his own name. It was in fact a consequence of having a father who had twice to my knowledge changed his surname to hide from either private or public prosecution. My grandfather had been moved by his father and mother to a new town using an alias surname. This name was even used in the 1891 census. The name chosen on this occasion was a slight corruption of my great grandfather's second wife's maiden name. She had died shortly after they fled to the new town. My grandfather had to go along with the subterfuge so obviously when he first applied to vote he used the alias surname.

The following year he clearly tried to get onto the list again, this time using his correct surname and was rebuffed as described above. He was probably very unhappy to have to go around pretending to be called something other than the name he had been born with. He married a few years later and used his correct name and when his criminal father died a year or so later he registered his father's death in his correct name.

As you can probably imagine I had the dickens of a job tracking my paternal family down from around 1870 until the end of the century. He started using aliases in time for the 1871 census when he also fled to a new town! I'm sure that this voting issue was just one of the difficulties faced by the family as my great grandfather hid from retribution. I doubt that I'll ever know the full extent of his actions but the ones I have been able to uncover are pretty horrendous. Little did they think (or perhaps care) that over a 100 years later I would be able to uncover some of it. I am also pretty sure that even my own father and his generation of the family knew very little about it.