Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 232

These three volumes present the first results of a project initiated by Professor Spufford at the University of Surrey, Roehampton to publish a series of county hearth tax returns for each county where there is not one in print. Transcription of the original lists, most held at the PRO, will be undertaken by volunteers using microfilms of the appropriate return obtained with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The aim of the project is to provide a national picture of the English and Welsh counties in which the density of those taxed, those taxed according to specific hearth number and those exempted is mapped on a parochial or equivalent basis. Such a picture can then be used as a background against which the typicality or atypicality of a settlement can be judged and as such will provide an immense resource for those interested in agricultural, economic, social, and family history.

The first volume, The potential of the hearth tax returns is an edited version of the Phillimore lecture delivered in November 2000 as a progress report on the project. By this date, the maps and tables for Cambridgeshire, Kent and Durham had been completed and Professor Spufford has drawn together the results from these counties to illustrate her vision. The comparable maps show that in Durham those parishes with over 70 per cent of householders paying on one hearth are not scattered spasmodically as in Cambridgeshire but are the norm all over the county, whereas in Kent, they appear only in some numbers in specific areas of the county. Such information presented pictorially does highlight the huge history review contrast between ‘rich agricultural and clothing Kent and poverty-stricken coal-mining Durham’ with Cambridgeshire sitting somewhere between the two. This is impressive work but its validity is open to the usual debate of the extent of comparability of hearth tax data both within and between counties. Similarly, there is the question of whether the recording of the exempt within the hearth tax lists is uniform enough to use as an indicator of poverty, whatever such a condition implies.

The two county volumes follow the usual format of a record society publication, the transcript preceded by a scholarly introduction in which the analysed data is discussed with the aid of well-produced tables and maps arranged by Susan Rose. Whilst the coverage of Cambridgeshire is virtually complete, that for Kent excludes the Cinque Ports and some smaller liberties. The data for Canterbury is taken from an earlier assessment. What sets these volumes apart from earlier hearth tax transcriptions is the standardization of the criteria used in the analyses and the maps, thus allowing for future comparison on a national scale.

Both introducers have used case studies of two or three villages to put flesh on the bones of the hearth tax data in terms of population density, buildings and the wealth and identity of their occupiers. The detailed layout of the Cambridgeshire list proved a more difficult task to transcribe for Nesta Evans, resulting in some errors, and the reader would have benefited from an illustration of a sample extract. The transcript supplies information for both 1662 and 1664 and with the inclusion of additional analyses for 1666 and 1674, the volume provides comparative data for four distinct dates. Although Evans has only briefly touched upon the use of such analyses to investigate the comprehensiveness of the transcribed return, the information is there for others to pursue. The strength of this introduction lies in its detailed comparison of the hearth tax data with that from other sources pinpointing areas of omission and evasion within the list and also suggesting possible fields for future research.

The simpler format of the Kent list, transcribed by Duncan Harrington and using different conventions, is easier to understand. In this introduction, Sarah Pearson has used her deep knowledge of surviving seventeenth-century Kent buildings to show that the relationship between hearths and wealth is not always straightforward. She is able to show that the smaller newer houses in the county tended to have more hearths per house than the older buildings whose occupiers were slow to upgrade their homes.

The potential of the hearth tax returns is well-known and Margaret Spufford is to be congratulated for her vision in initiating the recovery of the national picture. Hopefully, initial teething problems such as uniformity of conventions and typesetting and the danger of mistranscription will be addressed in the subsequent volumes. Publication of accurate transcriptions of these hearth tax lists, permitting comparison of the data both between and within counties, is a major stepping stone in the quest to determine their validity.