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
Paris in the 17th century again at Bercy. On the left bank, the edges of the city were at rue de Tolbiac to the east and close to the modern Pont d'Alma to the west. There was no official census of the city's population in the 17th century, but, using tax records, the amount of wheat consumed and church baptism records, modern historians estimate that it increased from about 300,000 in 1600 to 415,000 in 1637 to about 500,000 in about 1680. An account published in 1665 by Lemaire estimated that there were 23,000 houses in Paris, each inhabited by an average of twenty persons.