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
A Thatch-Roofed House with a Water Mill A Thatch-Roofed House with a Water Mill A Thatch-Roofed House with a Water Mill, also known as Water Mill near a Farm, is a 17th-century oil on panel painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Jacob van Ruisdael. It is in the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. English painter John Constable saw the painting in 1826 and wrote "It haunts my mind and clings to my heart". The painting is catalogue number 121 in Seymour Slive's 2001 catalogue raisonné of Ruisdael. The painting is number 165 in the 1911 catalogue raisonné by art historian Hofstede de