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
Peter Brooke (17th-century MP) Peter Brooke (17th-century MP) Sir Peter Brooke (c. 1602 – 1685) was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1646 and 1656. Brooke was the younger son of Thomas Brooke of Norton by Eleanor Gerard, his third wife. In 1646, he was elected Member of Parliament for Newton in the Long Parliament. In 1656 he was elected MP for Cheshire in the Second Protectorate Parliament. Brooke, then of Mere Hall, Cheshire which he bought in 1652, was knighted on 24 July 1660. He was High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1669. He was appointed