Liz wrote: > Thank you Charani. Will have to check them. YW :)) > I am curious to know - what is the maximum number of hearths anyone had? I've seen someone with 9 hearths but not more than that so far. The larger the house the greater the numer of hearths. All reception rooms would have had one and each of the bedrooms. > The Hearth Tax ceased in 1689. It seems the Window Tax started in 1696 so > how did they get money from the population between 1689 and 1696? I suppose > these taxes were like our Council Tax! According to my book, the Heath Tax was "finally abolished by Statute 1 Wm & Mary." It goes on to say "[s]ix years later a tax of 2/- was levied on all houses except cottages, and a tax on all windows in such houses exceeding nine in number." I would have thought there must have been some kind of tax in those six years. Just as people blocked up hearths or dug them up, so people bricked up windows to avoid paying tax on them. I have a book, published on 2006, on Houses and the Heath Tax published by the British Council for Archaeology (BCA Research Report 150) which is interesting and it has a piece on Bristol. The ISBN is 1 902771 65 6 but these publications can be difficult to get hold of once they are out of print. -- Charani (UK) OPC for Walton, Greinton and Clutton, SOM Asst OPC for Ashcott and Shapwick, SOM http://wsom-opc.org.uk