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
Hearth tax 1922 the building was destroyed by fire, which also destroyed the Rolls (along with the Ireland census records for 1821, 1831, 1841, and 1851), but copies of some of the Rolls have survived. The comprehensiveness and near-national coverage of hearth tax returns differentiates this historical evidence from other pre-modern surveys and tax records. Unlike other taxation surveys, the hearth tax recorded the names of those who were not liable to pay the tax, and hence provides a means of looking at a full range of social groups. The work of C.A.F. Meekings during the mid-twentieth century is an important resource