Hearth tax significant proportion of householders were not liable to pay at all. The hearth tax was much resented because it often entailed inspection of the interior of dwellings by the sub-collectors and petty constables, who had legal authority to enter every property to check on the number of hearths. Some people stopped up their chimneys so that the tax was not due on them, but where this was discovered by the assessors the tax was doubled. On 31 July 1684, a fire in Churchill, Oxfordshire, destroyed 20 houses and many other buildings, and killed four people. It was apparently caused by
Hearth tax In 2000, the award of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund paid for the microfilming of all of the taxation returns stored in The National Archives and a publishing partnership was established between the Centre and the British Record Society which has led to the publication of a number of county volumes. In 2004, The British Academy adopted the Hearth Tax Project and, in 2007 and 2009, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) made awards to fund a London and Middlesex Hearth Tax Project and a Collaborative Doctoral Studentship on Poverty in early-modern Essex. In 2010, the Centre