The Hearth Tax of 1674

Hearth Tax, as a means of raising money for The Crown, was introduced into England following the Restoration of the Monarchy under Charles II in 1660. It functioned on the principle of being a wealth tax, in that the number of fire-places in a house was taken as indicating the affluence of the occupant. The greater the number of rooms heated, the richer that householder was assumed to be – either as owner or renter. The levy was made in 1662-64, 1664-65, 1666-69, 1669-74, 1674-84 and 1684-89 – the last year of all being the one in which it was abolished by joint-monarchs William and Mary, following their accession to the throne following the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 during which James II was deposed. His successors agreed, and signed, a Bill of Rights with Parliament which created greater protection of individual freedoms and a fairer system of taxation, with the number of hearths per dwelling no longer used as the means of assessment.

The ways of collecting Hearth Tax (sometimes referred to as “Chimney Tax”) varied, using either directly appointed officers of some kind or contracting the task to designated individuals or syndicates (a process known as “farming out”). The return of 1674 for the county of Suffolk was transcribed by Sydenham Henry Augustus Hervey (a notable antiquarian member of the family whose seat was Ickworth House) and published by him in 1905 as Suffolk in 1674, being vol. 11 in his notable Suffolk Green Books series. This work can be accessed on the Internet Archive, with the Lowestoft information to be found on pp. 197-9. It has not been possible in this article to replicate the triple-column presentation of information used in the publication because of layout constraints, and so a two column one has been adopted. Bullet-pointed end-notes follow, as a way of explaining aspects of  the information’s presentation and content. 

The data, as given, has a good deal to reveal about Lowestoft’s history, over and above the information collected for fiscal purposes. Perhaps its most valuable aspect is to create a statement of the town’s socio-economic situation at a time when the town was recovering from the effects of an accumulation of disasters experienced during the first half of the 17th century. Two serious outbreaks of bubonic plague in 1603 and 1635 had taken their toll of the local population in both physical and psychological terms, while the fishing industry underwent a period of decline at the same time – partly as a result of the effects of epidemic, but also because North Sea herring catching activity was suffering from dominance of the Dutch in both capture and curing of the stock. Then there was the fire of March 1645 which took a heavy toll of properties on the east side of the High Street particularly, between Nos. 47 & 63 (as they are today) and destroyed all fish-houses along Whapload Road between the former No. 333 (below No. 1 High Street) and Rant Score.

Topping it all was the ongoing dispute with the town of Great Yarmouth (lasting for 300 years) as to that community’s legal limit of control over herring fishing and maritime trade in local waters. This finally reached a conclusion during the early years of the Restoration, with the setting up of a large oak marker-post on the Corton-Gunton denes (somewhere to the north of Lopham Score – long known as Tramp’s Alley) during January 1663. Which established once and for all the official seven-mile distance, measured out from Crane Quay in Yarmouth (near the present-day Town Hall) along the River Yare and the Suffolk coastline until its termination-point. Considerable expense was incurred by Lowestoft’s leading citizens in meeting the costs of lobbying activity on its behalf by friendly supporters in the House of Lords, and the whole of this political manoeuvring was headed up on behalf of the town by James Wilde (1612-84), merchant and philanthropist.  

•  The way in which the columns are read, per page, to reflect the sequence of the published document, is left-hand column across to right-hand column, then down to left-hand again and across to right on each following page.
•  The way in which the columns are to be read per section (this, indicated by a spacing-row), to reflect the sequence of the transcribed document, is left-hand column across to the right-hand one, then down to left-hand again and across to right in each following section.

•  Use of square brackets has been made mainly to give a more understandable form of people’s names (especially surnames) or a form more commonly used on the evidence of parish register entries of the time. There are also four examples of a missing single hearth entry having been made next to a two-hearth one in the “Certified For” part of the table.

•  Sydenham Hervey’s transcript makes use of dots, periodically, to indicate information which is missing. 

•  There is a great deal of variant spelling present throughout the document, including examples of it being applied to the same name. And even the name Lowestoft itself is given in accompanying brackets as Lowstolfe at the top of Sydenham Hervey’s tabulated data – no doubt the editing work of the man himself, in using what had become the correct form of the town’s name while showing at the same time how the original document had it spelled.

•  Use of a final -e on surnames (which declined, as time went on) was standard practice  during the 17th century – as was occasional use of y for i, which is most commonly seen in the surname Smyth (Smith).

•  The total number of hearths given as 323 at the end of the third section of the table is incorrect. It adds up to 304. The four cases shown of no hearths being recorded would not seem sufficient to make up the shortfall. The other two totals shown (16 and 109) are correct. 

•  The first set of hearths recorded – ending at the sum total of hearths referred to in the note above – related to the wealthier levels of Lowestoft’s population; the second, to houses standing empty for a year (also belonging to people of means); and the concluding one to people who could not afford to pay the tax of 1s [5p] per hearth.

•  There are two examples of tax being levied (single hearth and four in number) without the names of the occupiers or tenants being given. The document records this, as shown, with two rows of dots representing the missing names.

•  There is one example of a missing surname (which cannot be guessed at) and another where the Christian name is not recorded. A possibility for the latter is given.

•  There are 115 names, in all, recorded in the two parts of the table relating to taxpayers  shown as having hearths (including a missing surname and a missing Christian name), with the overwhelming majority of them – 107 in number – being those of men. The small duplication/repetition of male names present (Robert Brissingham, John Landefield, Samuel Mewse, John Soane, John Utting and Mr. Youell) probably shows townsmen living in one house and renting another out. Except for Robert Brissingham who had a dwelling standing empty. And John Daynes may have been another one in this category, if the John and Mr. referred to were one and the same person.  

•  Of the eight women mentioned, seven of them were widows and the remaining one a single lady – but all of sufficient means to hand to be taxable. 

•  The Mr. Yovele/Youle listed (with the v in the first spelling of the surname being an error   of transcription of some kind for a u) was almost certainly John Youell, the Vicar of Lowestoft from 1660-77. There is no way of working out which of his two dwellings was the Vicarage house and which the (presumably) rented property. Nor is the location of the former, at the time of the Hearth Tax, known.

•  In the transcribed form of the document, the 101 exemptions from the payment of tax are arranged mainly in groups of three people, bracketed together, with the figure 3 centred on the middle person of the trio – which indicates houses of one hearth only. It has not been possible to replicate this layout in the table, so dots have been placed to either side of the 3.

•  There are thirty-one of these particular groupings altogether, with four more of two people only (where one of the pair lived in a two-hearth house), and a final one of three people having four hearths collectively – though with no indication of which one of them had two hearths.

•  The 101 exemptions consisted of fifty-eight men and forty-three women (thirty-five widows and eight unmarried individuals) – which represents 46% of the overall number of the 220 people named. This shows the degree of deprivation and hardship present in the lower levels of Lowestoft's population, which is itself symptomatic of the effects caused by an accumulation of socio-economic problems referred to in the third and fourth paragraphs of this article’s introduction.

•  Where the men are concerned (57% of those in need), it is possible to identify a number of them as seafarers of one kind or another, involved in either fishing activity or maritime trade - or both. It is interesting, therefore, that during the same period of time as the Hearth Tax was imposed in 1674 a petition from the leading townsmen of Lowestoft, Kirkley and Pakefield was presented to the House of Lords seeking ways to improve the present distressed state of the fishing industry. The appeal was dated 24 February 1670 [1671, by revision of the calendar from Julian to Gregorian] and was closely followed by another one requesting exemption from the duty of 2s 6d imposed on every barrel of “fishing beer” consumed on board while at sea. It is no part of this article to go any further into the fishing industry’s troubles, but a detailed account of the matter is to be found in E. Gillingwater, An Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (London, 1790), pp. 88-92. 

•  The other main body of people requiring relief were women, with widows forming 35% and unmarried ones 8% of the whole. By the standards of the time, Lowestoft had a relatively advanced system of poor relief (which will form the subject of a future article), but it was not sufficient to bring recipients into anything like a comfortable mode of living.

•  The abbreviation Mr. (a shortened form of Mister and deriving from “Master”) is used for eighteen men paying Hearth Tax, with two of them – John Soane and Revd, John Youell – found recorded as having two examples of it. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the title became increasingly used to indicate high social standing in local communities – before eventually becoming used for all adult males, largely as the result of population increase and the process of industrialisation.

•  Mr. Porter of Carleton [Carlton Colville] was a local merchant, of Nonconformist religious belief and practice – Thomas by name – who owned what is now 77-79 High Street. He disposed of the property to his son John in December 1675. Though much changed in its outward appearance, the building retains parts of its internal timber-faming – boxed in, but still present.

•  The large house containing eleven hearths and belonging to Sir Thomas Allin was located on the western continuation of Swan Lane (Mariners Street) – near to where this roadway once ran into Fair Green (now, St. Margaret’s Plain). On retirement from his notable Naval service, which had enriched him by means of prize money and the manipulation of contracts (Samuel Pepys, Clerk to the Navy Board, noted how he “loved to get and save”), he acquired the manorial titles of both Lowestoft and Somerleyton in 1672 and retired to the latter to live the life of a country squire for his remaining years. His memorial can be seen, in an elevated position, on the South Chancel wall of the parish church there.

•  At some point, he offered this building as a replacement for the town’s schoolhouse, which abutted onto the east wall of St. Margaret’s Churchyard and held the town’s free Grammar School for forty local boys, established in 1570 via the will of Thomas Annot (merchant). This had fallen into serious disrepair by the year 1670 and the school then moved into the upper floor of the Town Chamber, remaining there after the rebuild of this particular structure in 1698.

•  The man named Mr. [Henry] Britten, in the Hearth Tax list, was Master of the school,  being appointed in 1667 and resigning his post in 1696. In a letter of 26 December 1701, addressed to “the Townsmen of Lowestoft” from his retirement in Wickham Market, he gave an account of the difficulties caused him by Sir Thomas Allin – this, to be found in Gillingwater, Lowestoft, pp. 326-7. Among the things mentioned is the request from a Mr. Evans (no specific year referred to) that he be allowed to run a “writing-school” in the building, which almost certainly would have been for boys only and taught basic literacy and numeracy.

•  John Evans first appears in a parish register baptismal entry of 20 February 1682 for a son named John – born to him and and his wife Dorothy. He duly opened his school, as requested, and ran it until his death at the beginning of the year 1706. His burial entry of 3 January describes him as “Town Clerk”, which shows that he had been using his literary and arithmetical skills to assist with the recording and implementation of civic matters in his adopted town. He also seems to have acted as a scrivener of some kind, since there are thirty-seven surviving wills (dating from between 1686 and 1705) which were written by him, and his elegant and exemplary handwriting is also to be found in the Overseers of the Poor accounts during the same period.

•  Much further down the line than the events referred to in the three previous notes, Sir Thomas Allin’s building eventually finished up as the venue for holding of legal Petty Sessions and Quarter Sessions in 1748. It then acquired the name of Shire House, presumably to elevate its standing and use as an arm of the law. It also had a lock-up for malefactors built nearby, which led to Fair Green becoming known as Cage Green for a time.

•  It seems likely (referencing the large number of hearths) that Sir Thomas Allin had originally built the house before his retirement, intending to live there after his days of Naval service were done. Given its number of heated rooms, it was certainly constructed for a domestic function rather than an educational one. Having then later acquired both the Lowestoft and Somerleyton manorial titles, he decided that an imposing Jacobean country seat was preferable to an edge-of-town dwelling – no matter how large and well appointed it may have been.

•  Returning now to the Hearth Tax document itself, it has a good deal to tell us about the  housing stock of Lowestoft at the time. It will be noticed by the reader that the great majority of one-hearth homes are recorded in that part of the table indicating the poorer element of the town’s population, where only eight people out of the 101 listed (five men, two widowed women and one individual of unknown gender in the last entry of all) had two hearths. Which represents a mere 8% of the total number of those named, as opposed to the 92% majority.

•  This, in turn, contrasts contrasts with the wealthier levels of the community where eighteen people (sixteen men, one widow and one unnamed individual) are shown to have had one-hearth dwellings, as opposed to the 102 who had two or more (figures of 15% and 85%, respectively – the latter including, again, one unnamed person).

•  The houses with one hearth only, among the poorer inhabitants of Lowestoft, would have been mainly the smaller dwellings in the side-lane area to the west of the High Street: Swan Lane (Mariners Street), Tyler’s Lane/Fair Lane (Compass Street/Dove Street), Bell Lane (Crown Street East & West), Frary Lane (Wesleyan Chapel Lane) and Blue Anchor Lane (Duke’s Head Street), which had West Lane/Back Lane (White Horse Street/Chapel Street) cutting through them, north to south.

•  These dwellings would have been would have been small two-up/two-down structures,  with some of them subdivided into one-up/one-down homes, and the heated space would have been the kitchen.

•  Single-hearth homes among the more affluent members of society would have been either a separate unit in larger subdivided house along the the High Street (with the kitchen again being the heated space) or a building which had not been updated with extra heating capacity in its rooms – and with the kitchen, once again, being the room where the hearth was located.

•  Thomas Howard, third of his family as Duke of Norfolk, referred to Lowestoft as “right well builded” in May 1545, as he reported on the town’s defensive capability against coastal attack, and many of the buildings he saw were probably still standing in 1674. The basic layout of most larger buildings of the 16th century was of lobby-entry/cross-passage type, with the three ground-level rooms of hall, parlour and kitchen surmounted by three chambers (bedrooms) above and with the roof-space sometimes converted into sleeping-space for servants. The structure was of half-timbered type, where the framed upper section sat on an oak wall-plate supported by a masonry ground-floor structure consisting mainly of brick. Chimney-stacks were usually located off-centre in the heart of the house, sometimes accompanied by an added or integral one on the end of the building.

•  In broad terms, the two-hearth houses listed in the tax return probably show two of the downstairs rooms being heated: either hall-kitchen or parlour-kitchen – the hall being the main reception room and the parlour one a more secluded space for private family use. Three hearths may indicate all three downstairs rooms having fireplaces, or two of them plus one of the chambers. Four or more hearths definitely indicates heating of one  or more chambers. It is also interesting to note that the presence of a chimneysweep in Lowestoft is recorded as early as 1580, when the occupation of Wyllyam Garrett is revealed in his wife’s parish register burial entry of 6 May – showing that the town’s houses were sufficiently well provided with flues to provide a living for someone keeping them clear.

•  The best surviving example of a chimney-stack’s multiple function is to be seen in No. 80 High Street, where the off-centre type clearly shows internally how it served to heat the hall and parlour on the ground floor and the hall chamber and parlour chamber above. The probate inventory of James Wilde (merchant), drawn up on 14 March 1684, shows andirons and other fire-related items in all four rooms.  

•  Surviving probate inventories from c. 1580-1730 (exactly 100 in number) giving details of the contents of houses following the death of the occupant, also serve to indicate which rooms were heated by reference to things such as andirons and tongs being located there. And the overall picture created is that the town’s better-off citizens were generally well provided for, where internal heating of their houses was concerned.

•  Given the amount of information relating to the town of Lowestoft in the year 1674, which is able to be extracted from the Hearth Tax return, the one thing remaining to be said is that it does not list all of the adult heads of house of the time. A long-established knowledge of the parish registers has made this writer aware that certain families of the time (e.g. the Arnolds, Ashbys, Buxtons, Feltons, Graves(es), Hawses, Neales, Pyes, Spratts, Woodens and others) simply do not feature. Which then leads on to speculation as to whether or not this surviving document is defective in some way, or was the predecessor of, or successor to, another one.

•  The best two examples of buildings present in Lowestoft at the time of the Hearth Tax, but not referred to with their occupants are No. 27 and Nos. 148-149A High Street. The former was the home of Thomas Ashby (merchant) and the latter – the Bell inn at the time – held by William Arnold (brewer). Their absence from the list of taxable properties is perhaps the strongest evidence that this document does not cover the whole of the town.  

•  The list of exemptions is an extensive one – seeming to be an adequate statement for the population of time (c. 1,600) – but the families cited in the previous note (and others) are conspicuous by their absence from that part of the data showing the people who were taxed.

•  It is also significant to note that the total number of houses recorded in the Manor Roll of 1618 was 211 (when the population was around 1,200 people), whereas that derived from the Hearth Tax was 222. Something, therefore, does not really add up – especially when a listing exercise of copyhold properties in town, carried out by the Revd. John Tanner during the early 1720s, produced something around 320 dwellings. And this was without the inclusion of at least another forty situated on freehold land. The best guess to be made from all of this is that the total number of houses in town in 1674 must have been around 290-300. 

•  This particular Hearth Tax document is to be found in the National Archives (Kew), with E179/257/14 as its reference number. Two other returns for Lowestoft are also located there: one for 1664 (E179/257/12) and another for 1669 (E179/257/17). Neither of these, in its own turn, is a complete statement of the adult population in the town (and therefore, by association, the accompanying number of dwellings) – with the head-count given as 247 for the former and 167 for the latter.

•  Study of the raw data from both the 1664 and 1669 returns produces much the same socio-economic picture as that deriving from the one of 1674 – this being one of overall difficulty and privation in the Lowestoft community. The number of people listed in 1664 totalled 247, with 141 men and nine women (all widows) paying tax and with ninety-seven exemptions recorded (sixty-seven men, a Watson only surname – probably male – and twenty-nine women: twenty-three widows and six single). The figures for 1669 have 167 individuals listed, with 118 men and ten women (nine widows and one married) paying tax and with four of the dwellings standing empty – including one belonging to Robert Brissingham (possibly the same as that recorded in 1674). Further to this, are five names unable to be read because of defects in the document and seven surnames with the Christian name missing. It is likely that all of them refer to men, bringing the overall male total up to 130. The exemptions totalled thirty-seven (twenty-six men and eleven women, made up of nine widows and two single).

•  In conclusion, it remains only to say that Lowestoft’s Hearth Tax Return of 1674 has so much more contained within it than mere fiscal information and stands as a classic example of a surviving record, created for one specific reason, which has so much more to reveal once closely scrutinised.      

CREDIT: David Butcher