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
Alderley House House" was completed, Sir Matthew Hale was granted the right of way from his new manor house into the churchyard. "The Lower House" was then to remain the Hale family home for the next 100 years. "The Lower House" was a substantial property: a nine-bay house with gables at either end and five small dormer windows in between. It was completed in the same year that Parliament introduced the Hearth Tax, and the surviving Hearth Tax Assessment records a house of 18 hearths. When ill-health forced him to relinquish his position as Lord Chief Justice in 1676, Sir Matthew Hale