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
Chiswick House It is dated c. 1610 in a late 17th-century engraving of the Chiswick House estate by Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, and was constructed with four sides around an open courtyard. Wardour sold the house to Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset in 1624. The house was quite large: in the 1664 Hearth Tax documents it is recorded as having 33 fireplaces. The house was at the south end of the Royalist line in the Battle of Turnham Green (1641), during the First English Civil War. The house was purchased by Charles Boyle, 3rd Viscount Dungarvan in 1682. The Jacobean