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⟩ to have first occurred in the dialects of southern England in the early 15th century, but did not affect Standard English until the later 17th century. It has affected most varieties of contemporary English, which have distinct vowels in pairs such as "cat", "cart". In non-rhotic accents, the of "cart" has been lost; in modern RP the word is pronounced , distinguished from "cat" only by the quality and length of the vowel. This lengthening occurred when was followed by non-pre-vocalic ; it did not generally apply before intervocalic (when the was followed by another vowel). Hence the first vowel