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
Shadow on the Hearth the Hearth" has ever been published, although a book club edition appeared. "Shadow on the Hearth" tells the story of "a Westchester woman and her two children after the explosion of a series of atomic bombs on New York". Merril described it as "a very political novel, ... written for political reasons". Merril began writing "Shadow on the Hearth" as a short story; "When it reached ten thousand words," she remembered, "I began to understand that it wanted to be a novel." Although she stopped working on the piece when it reached twice that length, needing to spend more time