Hearth less than 20 shillings a year and those who paid neither church nor poor rates. Also exempt were charitable institutions such as schools and almshouses, and industrial hearths with the exception of smiths' forges and bakers' ovens. The returns were lodged with the Clerk of the Peace between 1662 and 1688. A revision of the Act in 1664 made the tax payable by all who had more than two chimneys. The tax was abolished by William III in 1689 and the last collection was for Lady Day of that year. It was abolished in Scotland in 1690. Hearth tax records
Hearth tax led him to conclude that ‘the proportions of different hearth tax categories remained remarkably stable for the hundred’s six best assessments’. A decade later, Margaret Spufford cleared a path for local historians interested in studying local variations in wealth and poverty at county and parish levels, and set out the relevance of the hearth tax to architectural history and genealogy. She developed Hoskins’ argument that the numbers of hearths in a household could be equated with levels of personal wealth, and that by organising the properties into groups determined by the number of hearths, historians could assess patterns of wealth