The Dissenters experienced serious numerical decline after 1715 and this fact has contributed to the judgment that they were politically insignificant. C. E. Fryer made the first modern attempt to quantify the decline. In response to Richard Lodge's observation that since 1688 the Dissenters were the ‘backbone of the Whig party’, Fryer concluded that ‘neither upon the ground of numbers nor of political influence can the Dissenters be assigned any such anatomical importance’. This viewpoint has passed over into the body of common knowledge, so that one influential study of the Dissenters can say, ‘they were also thought to be fast declining and thus politically unimportant’. The anachronistic assumption behind such a statement is that numbers in eighteenth-century English politics counted for more than influence and patronage. In the decade of the 1770s, however, at the nadir of their numerical strength, the Dissenters exerted more political influence than they had fifty years before when they were far stronger numerically. Moreover, Fryer's statement ignores the critical issue of geography; a decline in numbers would have no bearing whatever on those boroughs where the franchise was tied to specific plots of land, and in several sections of England, Dissenters declined in the counties, but maintained their numbers in the large freeman boroughs. The failure of past treatments to keep numbers related to influence, and the concentration of population related to parliamentary boroughs, has seriously obscured the Dissenters' role in politics.