Suffolk in 1674, Vol. 13

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Excerpt from Suffolk in 1674, Vol. 13: Being the Hearth Tax Returns, Suffolk Green Books, No. XIThe history of this return put into a nutshell is this In the Spring Of 1662 Charles II entreated Parliament to grant him some money, and they granted to him and his successors two shillings a year on every hearth in England and Wales. The tax was to be paid by the occupier. At first it had to be collected by the local constables, but they being slack - about it officers appointed by the king had the collecting of it. From the very first this tax was odious to the people. Compared with it the Education Act of 1902 is universally beloved. Being odious it was resisted passively and actively passively by false returns and concealment of hearths, actively by stoning the chimney-men who came to collect it. The Justices of the Peace, many of them, sympathized with the people. The tax continued through the reigns of Charles II and James II but the very first thing that William III did was to send a message to the House of Commons that he was willing to agree to its being taken away. Consequently in April, 1689, a bill for taking it away received royal assent. The hearth tax Act was therefore only in force from the spring of 1662 to the spring of 1689, and from first to last was hated, evaded, and resisted.But its history, Parliamentary and otherwise, deserves rather a larger shell than that of a nut. I will therefore give that history more fully in the following sections of this preface.It will be seen that this return gives the number of inhabited houses in Suffolk as about with about hearths between them. If we reckon an average of 5 persons to each house, that would give Suffolk a population at that time of I will go more closely into the matter of population presently.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.