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 Academy Hearth Tax Project has recently made its electronic data from four hearth tax volumes available to the economic historians Chris Mimms and Patrick Wallis, who have used cliometrics in studying the social origins of apprentices in London. The development has been complemented by the on-line publication of hearth tax data, maps and statistics on Hearth Tax Online. Hearth Tax Online does not provide users—in the manner of new-style prosopographies which are often favoured in dealing with pre-modern lists of names—with access to a database with the capacity to sort heterogeneous data, in which factoids related to names are presented