Hearth Tax Return For Pudding Lane, 1666
This document is from the Lady Day (25 March) hearth tax returns for the area of Pudding Lane in the City of London
1BLOCKED HEARTH
The total number of chargeable hearths is given in the right-hand column. Sarah Easton, a tallowchandler (candlemaker), had one hearth “stopt-up”.
2EMPTY
Vacant houses are noted in their proper place along the street.
3ORIGIN POINT
Thomas Farriner, baker, had five hearths and one oven. It’s generally believed that the Great Fire of London started at this property, just over five months later.
4ADDRESS
Exact addresses are not given, but the street name is noted. The assessor went house-by-house along each side of the street.
5PROSPEROUS AREA
Many of the properties on Pudding Lane were big enough to have multiple hearths.
And income tax? Tried briefly in 1513–1525, and again in the 1690s, it was very problematic because most people could not easily calculate their income. In the 1790s, though, William Pitt the Younger reintroduced it temporarily to help fund the fight against Napoleon, and a permanent income tax was introduced in 1842. It has been extremely successful, and shows no signs of going away.
A couple of important points need to be made. First, not all people paid tax, and the further back you go the smaller the percentage of the population who did. Indeed, the poor are unlikely to appear at all – most taxation records are concerned only with the middle and upper classes. As noted, with the hearth tax there may be lists of those exempted from payment, but in the land tax records property owners or better-off occupiers appear.
Second, many tax returns only state the name of the person concerned (normally, the head of the household) and perhaps the place of residence. Other information – an actual address, family details, occupation – are much less common.
‘Most taxation records are concerned only with the middle and upper classes’
Records In The Archives
Many tax records are only available as original documents in record offices, but some key groups have been published and can be accessed online (though few before 1660). Most national taxation records are held at The National Archives (TNA) in Kew ( nationalarchives.gov.uk). For those before 1689, the E179 database is a comprehensive listing, arranged by place and going back to the 13th century: nationalarchives.gov. uk/e179. It doesn’t give the records’ contents, but does tell you what should be available for the location you are interested in.
The medieval poll tax records in E179 have been published in full by the British Academy, edited by Carolyn Fenwick in the three-volume The Poll Tax Returns of 1377, 1379 and 1381. The first volume (1998) covers Bedfordshire to Leicestershire; the second volume (2001) covers
Lincolnshire to Westmorland; and the third volume (2005) covers Wiltshire to Yorkshire. Scottish poll tax records are at the National Records of Scotland (class E70; nrscotland.gov. uk/research/ guides/taxationrecords). They only cover 1693–1699, and are incomplete, but they include all adults not in receipt of charity, may also name children, and are now on the government website scotlandsplaces.gov.uk.
In addition, lay subsidy records are in E179 at TNA. Many counties have published editions, including the 1323 return for Devon (1969) and the 1327 one for Gloucestershire (1993). Check with your record office to see whether those for your area are available in print, but remember that this and the English poll tax material long predate parish registers and making reliable links with your family will be challenging.
Much more useful are the hearth tax records. Coverage varies by county – some have several returns from the 1660s and 1670s, others only one, and for a few there is no complete return. The original records are at TNA, but many contemporary copies survive in local archives. For many counties a complete transcript has been published (giving the names of the heads of households who paid or were exempt, and details of number of hearths, arranged by parish or township). The majority are published by the Hearth Tax Project based at the University of Roehampton; there is an excellent website, Hearth Tax Digital, at gams. uni-graz.at/context:htx (see the box on page 66).
As for land tax records, these will be in your county record office, usually among the quarter sessions material. The only full return is in TNA (IR23, a 121-volume set all for 1798), but duplicates were held locally as they helped determine who could vote in county elections. The land tax is especially valuable because it was long-lasting – technically, from 1693 and not formally abolished until the 1960s. For most counties surviving returns cover the period from 1780 to 1832, so it is often possible to trace individuals over the decades.
Online Sources
There is a good deal of material online. Ancestry. co.uk has a collection of London returns, where I found that in 1818 my 3x great grandfather Zachariah Goldring was a tenant of John Crichton in Curtain Road, Shoreditch, and paid 7s 6d tax. Ancestry has been extending coverage of other counties, such as Surrey, Bedfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. Findmy past.co.uk has returns for Cheshire and Norfolk. Few sets of land tax records are available in print.
Finally, taxation in Scotland differed greatly from that in England and Wales, with many specific levies on assets and commodities. ScotlandsPlaces has coverage of an extraordinary range,