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
Pronunciation of English ⟨a⟩ the more conservative in the 17th century, and was "generally accepted by careful speakers by about 1670". This vowel (that of "trap", "cat", "man", "bad", etc.) is now normally denoted as . In present-day RP, however, it has lowered to a fully front . Such a quality is also found in the accents of northern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the Caribbean. In North America, however, there is a trend towards tensing (raising) of this vowel. Raised pronunciations are also found in Southern Hemisphere English, and are also associated with Cockney. For the possibility of phonemic length differentiation, see "bad–lad"