The Hearth Tax of England and Wales

Chair: Professor Trevor Dean 
Project Director: Dr Andrew Wareham

The Hearth Tax Research Project is a digital humanities project, based at the University of Roehampton, which maximises the research applications of the Restoration Hearth Tax, a census-style taxation for Britain and Ireland during the 17th century. The tax was introduced in 1662 into England, Wales and Ireland. The tax used fireplaces as proxy for wealth to provide money for the royal purse until its abolition in perpetuity in 1689 in England and Wales, though, it continued to be collected in Ireland into the 19th century, and it was collected in Scotland in the early 1690s. The records show huge variations in household hearth numbers ranging from the houses with no hearths at all to Hampton Court Palace with 1700 hearths. The documents also record those exempt from paying, those who were in arrears, and those who refused to pay.

The digital methods of an ‘assertive edition’ draw both upon 'traditional' academic skills and resources from archival research to palaeography, and digital resources and methods from Ancestry to TEI-XML. Thus, the project provides scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the general public, with enhanced open access to the records. Users do not, for example, need be proficient in early modern palaeography and Latin, and are able both to read the records as set in the original manuscripts, access statistics via GIS mapping, and undertake advanced searches of the records. By 2026 the Hearth Tax Project will have completed work on around 20 English counties, which fall within its remit.

Further information is available on Hearth Tax Digital.

Dr Andrew Wareham: [email protected] | [email protected].