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
Pronunciation of English ⟨a⟩ varieties of English, by analogy with "father". The table below represents the results of broadening before fricatives in contemporary Received Pronunciation. In general, all these words, to the extent that they existed in Middle English, had ("short A" as in "trap") which was broadened to . The exceptions are: The words "castle", "fasten" and "raspberry" are special cases where subsequent sound changes have altered the conditions initially responsible for lengthening. In "castle" and "fasten", the was pronounced, according to a slight majority of 16th and 17th century sources. In "raspberry" we find rather than . The pattern of lengthening shown