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
English Land Tax lands. English Land Tax The English land tax was a national property tax introduced by Parliament in 1692. The tax was levied on rental values and applied both to rural and to urban land. No provision was made for re-assessing the 1692 valuations and consequently they remained in force well into the 18th century. In the 1690s, the tax raised around two million pounds, equating to roughly thirty five per cent of national revenue. Under what was to prove to be the last of the Penal Laws, Catholic landowners had to pay double the actual assessment of the value of