Definition
A direct tax levied on households in England based on the number of hearths or stoves within a dwelling. Enacted by statute 14 Car. II, c. 10 (1662), the tax required payment of two shillings per hearth or stove annually. It applied across the kingdom and was collected at the household level, making it one of the earliest attempts at a broad domestic property-based tax in English fiscal history. The levy was widely resented as intrusive — enforcement required tax collectors to enter private homes to count hearths — and was abolished by 1 W. & M., St. 1, c. 10 (1689), shortly after the Glorious Revolution. Also known as chimney money.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern circulation; occasionally encountered in historical or genealogical contexts referring to English taxation records of the Restoration era.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently defined; "hearth" denotes the floor of a fireplace or the domestic home as a symbol of family life.
The gap here is one of register rather than meaning: a modern reader encountering "hearth money" in a historical document might read it as a metaphorical or colloquial phrase about household finances. In legal and fiscal history, it is a precise technical term for a specific statutory tax with defined rates, administration, and a documented legislative history.
Common Confusion
Hearth money and chimney money are the same tax. Both terms appear in historical sources — including the source statutes and legal dictionaries — referring to the identical levy under 14 Car. II, c. 10. Researchers should treat the two terms as interchangeable when working with seventeenth-century English materials. Confusion can arise when hearth money records are compared across counties, as local administration varied and surviving records are uneven; apparent discrepancies often reflect administrative inconsistency, not separate tax schemes.
Why It Matters in Research
Hearth money is a closed historical term. It applies exclusively to the English tax of 1662–1689 and has no continuing legal meaning in modern common law jurisdictions. Researchers encounter it in three contexts:
First, legal history and constitutional development. The hearth tax is a significant episode in the history of taxation, parliamentary authority over revenue, and the limits of crown prerogative. Its abolition came immediately after the Glorious Revolution and is often cited in scholarship on the constitutional settlement of 1689. Researchers working on the development of English tax law or parliamentary sovereignty will find hearth money a relevant reference point.
Second, genealogical and property records. Hearth money rolls — the administrative records of the tax — survive in county and national archives and are widely used by genealogists and local historians to establish household size, property status, and geographic distribution of population in Restoration-era England. Legal researchers should be aware that these records exist and may appear in evidentiary or historical appendices in property disputes involving ancient title.
Third, dictionary and treatise cross-referencing traps. Black's Law Dictionary includes a stray entry fragment referencing 1 Bl. Comm. 129, 134 in proximity to the hearth money entry. This is not part of the hearth money definition — it belongs to a separate entry on persons and health-related injuries. Researchers consulting early Black's editions should not conflate these fragments.
No jurisdictional analog survived into American law. The hearth tax was not transplanted to the colonies, and American tax law developed along different lines from independence forward.
Historical Dictionary Support
The source dictionaries agree on the core definition. Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary define hearth money identically: a two-shilling tax per hearth or stove under 14 Car. II, c. 10, abolished by 1 W. & M., St. 1, c. 10, also called chimney money. Burrill's Law Dictionary confirms the two-shilling rate and identifies the authorizing statutes as 13 & 14 Car. II, though the entry as preserved is fragmentary and does not reach the abolition.
The minor discrepancy between Black's citation of 14 Car. II alone and Burrill's reference to 13 & 14 Car. II reflects the parliamentary session numbering conventions of the period rather than a substantive disagreement about the tax. Historical sources are consistent that the levy was deeply unpopular, primarily because its enforcement mechanism — physical inspection of dwellings — was experienced as a violation of domestic privacy.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the administrative record the tax generated. The hearth money rolls are extensively catalogued in English county archives and have been the subject of substantial scholarly and genealogical work, but that dimension falls outside the scope of legal dictionary treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Hearth money is exclusively an English legal term with no equivalent in Scottish, Irish, or American legal traditions. Researchers working with Welsh or Irish historical records from the same period should note that separate administrative arrangements applied in those jurisdictions, though similar domestic taxes were attempted.