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
Thomas Lane (17th-century MP) Thomas Lane (17th-century MP) Thomas Lane (1582 – 31 December 1652) was an English lawyer and politician who sat in the House of Commons variously between 1625 and 1648. Lane was educated at Clifford's Inn and was a bencher of the Inner Temple and lord of the manor of Greenford Parva. In 1625 Lane was elected Member of Parliament for Wycombe and was re-elected in 1628. After an eleven-year period during which King Charles I ruled without parliaments, Lane was re-elected for Wycombe in April 1640 for the Short Parliament. He was re-elected in November 1640 to the Long Parliament