This is the seventh handsome volume in the British Record Society Hearth Tax Series, and the first of the Midlands counties to appear: so far we have had Kent and Cambridgeshire to the south and east, and County Durham, West Riding of Yorkshire and Westmorland to the north. The Hearth Tax Project aims to publish the best and most complete return for those counties which have not yet produced one, and to analyse them statistically to provide a national survey of population, households and social and economic status across Restoration England and Wales. Tom Arkell has been working on the hearth tax for many years, both nationally and locally in Warwickshire, and this volume is the fruit of much scholarship. He is particularly good on the administration and collection of the tax and the complicated administrative divisions which bedevilled it. As Warwickshire has more complete returns extant than any other county, as he points out throughout the introduction, it was possible to compare returns for different years, which revealed just how unreliable one list could be, with names, numbers of hearths and the number of exempt varying from list to list.

The Hearth Tax Project's statistics from the returns enable comparison across the country, so the differences in all sorts of measures between Kent and Westmorland, for instance, are very marked, especially the percentages of exempt and one-hearth households, and the multi-hearth households. This is, of course, what might be expected, considering topography, climate and natural resources. It looks as if Warwickshire lies between these two extremes, but Tom Arkell has not made use of what has become the standard statistics for other hearth tax scholars, and has long argued that the towns must be separated from the rural areas, and that it is more meaningful to use as a comparator the percentages of one- and two-hearth households against those with three or more. By this means he divides Warwickshire into seven regions, and compares Warwickshire with other counties using his own statistics, but there is little attempt to explain the significance of his findings: we might have expected him to explore why one area had so many more multi-hearth households than another.

He has used much other evidence of the period such as probate inventories, overseers of the poor's accounts, churchwardens’ accounts and more, to fill out and elucidate the bare facts given by the hearth tax. His discussion of the social and occupational structure of Restoration Warwickshire is particularly interesting. There was no rigid hierarchy here between different classes, as there were considerable inconsistencies in giving titles and honorifics such as ‘Gentleman’ or ‘Mr.’, and a ‘yeoman’ might live in a one-hearth house or in one with five or six. English society was clearly more complex and fluid than might at first appear. Similarly, ‘the exempt’ were not a homogeneous group but comprised several layers of relative poverty, with those receiving relief from the parish at the bottom. Hearths were found in houses, of course, and Nat Alcock's section on the housing of late seventeenth-century Warwickshire ranges from the largest aristocrat's mansion to the smallest cottage. He has used a combination of documentary evidence and surviving standing buildings, most of them timber-framed, to paint a picture of what the hearths and their chimneys were like, how the rooms were used, and the number of rooms that might be expected in a one-hearth or two-hearth house. The detailed pictorial map and manorial survey of Chilvers Coton, done in 1684, provide much detail, particularly for the smallest houses, none of which have survived to the present day.

This volume has excellent illustrations showing houses large and small, and the coloured maps reveal the statistics in an easily assimilated visual form. Family historians have always known that the hearth tax was a useful source, as have social and economic historians, but for the latter it has always been a difficult mass of data to handle. The hearth tax project is making all this data available, county by county: when complete it will provide invaluable insights into society, economy, population, wealth and poverty, and developments in vernacular architecture, across the country. The Warwickshire volume is an excellent addition to this body of research.