Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 131

The value of the hearth tax returns to family historians is now well attested, but it is really only since the mid-1980s that their potential significance for the history of houses has been recognized. This book arose out of a conference which brought together historians, archaeologists and architectural experts to pool their understanding of the documents and the surviving structures and so add to the greater body of knowledge. Some of the contributors look primarily at the problems of using the data (Parkinson, Arkell) but the central thrust of the book is to look at regional housing differences using the hearth tax returns. The regional coverage is mixed – Huntingdonshire and Warwickshire represent ‘The Midlands’, and, of the counties west of the Pennines, only Westmorland receives any attention. However, the point of the conference and now the thirteen regional contributions to this book was not to achieve blanket coverage, but to identify and reflect regional variation as a platform for work on the hearth tax returns in the future.

Judged from this perspective, the findings are not perhaps as path breaking as the conference convenors may have hoped. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the greater the number of hearths, the wealthier the household, but at the same time, the number of hearths was dictated among the wealthier members of society by individual preference in relation to the use of wealth. Consequently, as we have known for well over twenty years, ‘the occupiers of one-hearth houses ranged from the poor to the moderately prosperous’ (p.177). We are faced in other words with the same problem that impacts on our modern society, of cash-starved (mainly elderly) people who happen for one reason or another to live in large (multi-hearthed in seventeenth-century terminology) houses. Nor is it clear where the essays take us next. Several of the authors use probate inventories, which is a standard way of assessing the relationship between house size and wealth, but the overall conclusion is that such linkages have to be tested carefully and used sparingly. Far better is the evidence of the taxed houses today, but the survival rate varies regionally, and the quality and build of the original properties was affected by the relative abundance or shortage of good building materials.

As far as rural historians are concerned, there is some evidence of differences in numbers of hearths between predominantly arable economies in the south-east, and pastoral economies, perhaps because arable farming had greater labour requirements. Possibly also the storage of grain required different heating arrangements from cheese and meat, where these were kept within the household. But the hearth tax evidence is almost certainly less helpful in relation to households than the material which has been derived from probate inventories over the past forty years. If these conclusions seem rather nebulous, they should not detract from the point of the conference, which was to air the issues in an academic forum. Like the frustratingly voluminous but relatively limited land tax assessments at the end of the eighteenth century, the hearth tax returns may raise our hopes simply because they are so numerous, only to dash them because the evidence is less susceptible to manipulation than we might hope. The hearth tax returns will always be useful to family historians, but what this conference demonstrated is that they may never be quite as useful in the study of houses as the existence of so much data on the number of hearths would lead us to anticipate.

Be that as it may, the regional studies tell us a good deal about houses in late seventeenth-century England, and in themselves make a significant contribution to our understanding of what survives, and what surviving structures tell us about the communities in which they were located. If the hopes of the conferees were only partially fulfilled, we can at least thank the organisers for sponsoring a number of short, well-illustrated regional studies, which are themselves interesting discussions of vernacular architecture in the late seventeenth century. Perhaps the book’s subtitle should have been given greater prominence.