This volume is the sixth in the British Record Society's Hearth Tax series arising from the British Academy Hearth Tax Project at Roehampton University. Despite being concerned with a small, far flung, rural county, the Hearth Tax material for Westmorland provides plenty of interest. The county is unusual in possessing a particularly detailed survey of hearths made during the winter of 1674–5 for the commissioner appointed when the tax was farmed for a second time. The survey survives in a private copy, made for the leading Westmorland Justice of the Peace, Sir Daniel Fleming, and in a separate document covering the town of Kendal. It is a rare survival from the years when the Hearth Tax was farmed out and allows comparisons to be drawn with the 1670 return preserved in The National Archives, E179. Both the 1670 return and the 1674–5 survey are printed in full in this volume. The surveyors in 1674–5 succeeded in identifying substantially more taxable hearths than appear on the returns in E179, raising questions about not only the completeness of the earlier returns, but also how administrators defined a ‘household’ and the consistency with which the rules on exemption from the tax were applied.

The wide ranging introduction to this volume falls under four headings: Catherine Ferguson, the general editor of the Hearth Tax series, has contributed a short preface; Elizabeth Parkinson an account of the administration of the tax; Colin Phillips an introduction to Westmorland c. 1670 and a more substantive discussion of the data provided by the documents printed in the volume. A plates section includes not only the detailed distribution maps of numbers of hearths and exemptions which are a feature of the series but also some striking illustrations of the county's seventeenth-century houses, notably plans and sketches of individual houses drawn by the local antiquary, Thomas Machell, in the late seventeenth century and the drawings of the towns of Appleby and Kendal made by Gregory King in 1665.

Perhaps the salient feature of the Westmorland Hearth Tax is the preponderance of one-hearth dwellings. Catherine Ferguson's preface, which briefly compares the Westmorland evidence on numbers of hearths with the evidence from other northern counties and from Cambridgeshire and Kent, shows how Westmorland's overwhelming majority of one-hearth houses, standing at eighty per cent of all households in the 1670 returns, set it apart from other counties. The comparable figures were approximately seventy per cent for County Durham; fifty-seven per cent for the West Riding of Yorkshire; and thirty-six per cent for Kent. Colin Phillips’ careful analysis of the one-hearth households in Westmorland demonstrates that the temptation to explain the pattern by reference to poverty in a bleak, remote northern county should be avoided: ‘a simple equation between one-hearth households and relative poverty must not be made’, he concludes. Painstaking work relating properties listed in the Hearth Tax returns to probate inventory evidence makes it clear that some occupiers of one-hearth houses were wealthy men. Almost one-fifth of the probate inventories which could be linked to one-hearth households had goods valued at over one hundred pounds. Fuel scarcity, the strength of the vernacular building tradition and the splitting of multi-hearth houses between family members may all have contributed to Westmorland's fashion for one-hearth houses.

Editorial standards in presenting the texts of the documents are high. My main quibbles concern the quirks of local administration in seventeenth-century Westmorland. There are significant differences between the territories used for assessment in 1670 and those used by the survey of 1674–5, the latter frequently grouping households by the name of the hamlet or section of the constablewick in which they were located, thus providing historians with a remarkably fine grained listing of householders. Indexing these sub-township units has not always been achieved successfully, with the result that it is sometimes difficult to relate them to the map of constablewicks used for analysis and on the back endpaper. There was also scope for more editorial comment on some aspects of the documents printed. For example, how is the reader to interpret the repetition of short runs of householders’ names found in some returns, such as Sandford and Birkbeck Fells in 1670 (pp. 119, 141)? We are not told. But these are minor glitches in a handsome and welcome addition to this important series.