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⟩ well as in foreign borrowed words like "spa", "taco", "llama", "drama", "piranha", "Bahamas", "pasta", "Bach", many of which vary between and among different dialects of English. Some of these developments are discussed in detail in the following sections. In late Middle English, pairs such as "cat", "cart", were pronounced , respectively, distinguished only by the presence or absence of . However, by the late 17th century they were also distinguished by the quality and length of the vowel. In "cat", the vowel had been fronted to , while in "cart" it had been lengthened to . This latter change seems