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
History of the English fiscal system the above - at any rate in its nature as a direct impost - was the poll or capitation tax. Financial pressure at the close of Edward III's reign (1377) led to the adoption of a tax of fourpence per head on all persons in the kingdom (mendicants and persons under fourteen years being excepted). This "tallage of groats", which seems to be derived by analogy from the hearth money for Peter's Pence, was followed by the graduated poll taxes of 1379 and 1380, the former ranging in scale from ten marks (£6 13s. 4d.) imposed on royal dukes and