Derivation of hustings.

It's Old Norse. It means to bring people to-gether from where we get hustle".

It was a temporary wooden structure on which the candidates stood to tell the crowd how wonderful they were and be heckled and voted for (or not). Voting was public and noisy.

Found a wikipedia entry -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husting. Apparently from a germanic word for "house thing"

I was in Shropshire over Easter, where several pubs were advertising a meet the candidates Hustings. I can't imagine this happening in the urban or inner city areas.