Those attending the launch of the digital edition of Norfolk & Norwich 17th-century Hearth Tax at Norfolk RO heard Andrew Wareham on wealth & poverty, Joel Halcomb on non-conformity, and PeteSeaman on exemptions for the poor.

Coming soon: 3 December launch of Norfolk and Norwich Hearth Tax editions at Norfolk Record Office,3.00 p.m. - 5.00 p.m. To attend email [email protected]

Yorkshire North Riding 1673: at Danby, near Scarborough, there was a ‘Schoole house wherein poore people live’. Wonder how that worked - pupils and homeless sharing spaces, or school suspended?

An extreme case inequality of wealth by gender?At Shipton & Overton, North Riding 1673: all but two of the eleven exempt from hearth tax, presumably due to poverty, were women, as opposed to only one fifth of householders liable to pay

Newbrough, North Riding 1673: Viscount Fauconberge’s house had exactly half of the 72 hearths in the village. This was the man who married Oliver Cromwell’s daughter?

Egton, Yorkshire North Riding in 1673 had 180 households which suggests a population similar to today’s of c. 450. In 1673 lots of repeated family names: the Knags and Petches, the Pearsons and Harlands, the Snawdens and Brackans, and more. Where are they now?

Women’s given names in Yorkshire North Riding 1673: among all the Marys, Elizabeths and Margarets, it’s nice suddenly to encounter something different such as Penellope (sic) Seaton in Skinningrove. She and (presumably) her mother had the largest house in the village.

Notes from Yorkshire North Riding 1673, continued. In the village of Busby, the squire had a house with 12 hearths and the fortune-less but grandly named Hercules Fletcher had only one hearth and was exempted from payment on account of poverty.

We’re still checking transcripts of Hearth Tax lists for Yorkshire North Riding before publishing them on Hearth Tax Digital. There are about 11,000 entries on my rough calculation. So checking them all is taking a while. We’ll keep posting tidbits here to whet appetites.

How many Isaac Newtons were there in England in 1673? Isaac not a common name, though found more then than now. A Mr Isaac Newton had an 8-hearth house in Ruswarp near Whitby in the North Riding hearth tax registers.

Now published on Hearth Tax Digital are the records for Hertfordshire 1662-3, Norfolk 1672 and Norwich 1671. For the first time we have now included photographs of the documents for Hertfordshire, courtesy of TNA.

To former followers of our account on X-Twitter, we’re now posting on Bluesky, with a range of news about upcoming digital publications, launches and interesting details from the English hearth taxes of the 1660s-70s. #skystorians #familyhistory

Unusual name of the day, Fylingdale, Yorkshire, 1673: Arnald Incter. From Hearth Tax records for North Riding available 2026 on Hearth Tax Digital.

Another interesting feature of Whitby is the very small number of householders exempted from the tax for poverty: only 13, 8 of them women, out of a total for the town of some 350.

I’m currently checking the transcript for Yorkshire North Riding in 1673 and have reached Whitby where I find that Sir Hugh Cholmley had a house with 39 hearths. This makes it the biggest house so far in N. Riding. According to Wikipedia the house was built only 1672.

Hearth Tax Digital already contains house-by-house data for eleven counties and four cities of late 17th century England. Coming soon: Chester, Southwark, Berkshire and Yorkshire North Riding.