This handsome two-part set is the ninth in a series of hearth tax volumes published by the British Record Society, in association with the long-running Centre for Hearth Tax Research at Roehampton University. Other volumes in the same series now published cover hearth tax assessments for the East and West Ridings of Yorkshire, Durham, Westmorland, Warwickshire, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex and Kent, with further counties yet to come. In each case, the editors centre their efforts on the most complete and/or reliable of the unpublished extant hearth tax assessments, which at present range in date from 1666 to 1674, while the tax was levied between 1662 and 1689.

In this London and Middlesex volume, the transcription is mostly taken from the delayed post-plague Lady Day 1666 assessments, some of which took place before the Great Fire and others after. Missing records for the eight of forty books that did not survive, including populous areas such as Westminster, are supplemented from the hearth taxes of 1662–1663 and 1664. Rich in archival detail, part I consists of 15 scholarly chapters and notes contextualising and explicating the source material. Part II contains full transcriptions of the hearth tax assessments. Colour maps and a statistical summary provide an overview of the density and distribution of households and hearths. Name, place and subject indices anticipate a range of readers with different requirements.

The hearth tax has long been known as a notoriously difficult source, described by Arkell in his 1992 overview for Surveying the people as ‘frustratingly complicated’ to use. In theory, a tax of one shilling was payable by property occupiers for every hearth in England and Wales at six-month intervals, excepting some types of industrial and institutional hearths and those exempted as living in circumstances too mean to warrant taxation upon the amenity, who were not always the poor. By 1666 assessments were supposed to list all householders, exempt or not. In practice, while the tax was successful in raising revenue (albeit nowhere near so much as projected), its surviving documents are anything but uniform or simple, and those for London and Middlesex are among the most complex.

In part I, Vanessa Harding provides an overview of the demographic and economic context of Restoration London, highlighting administrative complexities, population trends and migration, and the changing loci of industry. Elizabeth Parkinson describes the intricacies of the administration of the London and Middlesex hearth tax, particularly concerning exemption, and the roles of local officials and tax farmers. Ian Warren gives insights into variability of the architecture of the houses of the well-to-do, while Peter Guillery assesses housing conditions and the interior layouts of homes of the poorer and frequently overcrowded suburban majority. David Hey explores the preponderance of surnames indicative of particular regional or national origin. Catherine Ferguson contributes a concordance to Samuel Pepys's social circle, locating and listing biographical details for 460 persons out of some 2,500 sought.

Several additional short pieces list and document the nature and extent of hearth tax sources, including exemption certificates. There is a detailed note on the form and structure of the manuscripts by Peter Seaman, which serves as accompaniment to Andrew Wareham's guide to using the edition. John Price provides a convenient statistical summary of the number of households and hearths assessed per parish, discounting those duplicate records in the sources that have been deliberately retained. The four administrative unit boundary maps printed as front and end pages provide a quick reference to metropolitan London's geography.

A browse through the transcriptions of part II underlines the range of layouts for lists of named occupiers. Columns of Xs prove ambiguous, indicating liability or exemption. The transitory nature of some entries is apparent, as the number of hearths may be ‘in dispute’, inhabitants are now dead, removed, or recently arrived in London, and houses or even whole parishes are ‘burnt all’ (p. 705 and p. 879). As Elizabeth Parkinson acknowledges, the 1666 Lady Day assessments ‘are not among the most reliable’ of hearth taxes (p. 76). Difficulties of collecting the tax spring to life in the actions of those who resist payment by greeting collectors with ‘dore shutt’, or even ‘violent oppo:sicon’, or claim that they ‘will pay when ye rest of his Neighbors [do] & shut ye dore’ (p. 98 and p. 1005). Equally, reasons for popular dislike of collectors are easy to find in the distraint of humble household goods, a practice also highlighted by Catherine Ferguson in her preface. Reporting of occupations in some parishes provides additional socio-economic context. Many empty houses attest to the recent shadow of plague mortality. Insights into accounting practice come from the inclusion of subtotals and totals of amounts owing or collected, transcribed in Arabic or Roman numerals as given. Names are transcribed in the original orthography, although for women, the name typically consists of title and surname with no forename.

Since these same records are available to view via British History Online, and the entire dataset is downloadable from the University of London's online dataset repository SAS-space (http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/2578/ in Microsoft Access relational database format), a question that naturally arises is whether a full printed edition is worthwhile. The answer lies partly in the necessity of getting to grips with the commentary included to understand and make effective use of the hearth tax, and partly in the ability to display its idiosyncrasies at a glance that a printed transcript provides. However, it should be noted that even this faithful transcription loses a little of the nuance of the original layout, for example when the columnar arrangement of the originals is condensed into a space-saving layout, so that the convention in most volumes of payers on the left and non-payers on the right is more difficult to discern. Nonetheless, the volume succeeds admirably in making the hearth tax accessible to a wider audience, especially those not expert in seventeenth-century palaeography.