This handsomely produced volume is the fourth in the British Record Society's Hearth Tax series and follows similar publications that transcribe, analyze, and map the Hearth Tax returns for 1664 (for Michaelmas and Lady Day, respectively) for the counties of Cambridgeshire and Kent, plus a volume devoted to exemptions certificates for 1670–74 for the towns of Norwich, Great Yarmouth, King's Lynn, and Thetford in Norfolk. The Hearth Tax Project, now sponsored by the British Academy, is both ambitious and important. The long-term aim is to provide complete coverage—as far as source survival will allow—of the whole of England and Wales, utilizing the most comprehensive Hearth Tax listings that survive for each county in the 1660s and 1670s. The present volume reproduces the return for Lady Day 1666, a somewhat shorter listing than that for Lady Day 1674, but the one that contains more legible names and covers the historic county of Durham, excluding those detached areas that formed part of the Palatinate. The 1674 return is not entirely ignored, as table 7 provides a list of hearths and households from this assessment, indicating the number of illegible entries in each township, while it is also used to inform Adrian Green's analytic introduction. The volume includes four appendices, listing in turn extant Durham Hearth Tax documents, the local Hearth Tax records drawn up by the constables of the township of Tudhoe, extracts from the notebook of John Kay of West Auckland, and Durham exemption certificates discovered to date in the National Archives—ninety dated 15 January 1671 (new style calendar) and eighty-eight with various dates between 20 May 1673 and 18 September 1674. The volume is completed by a bibliography, a personal name index, an index of places, and an index of subjects.

The standards of transcription for this series are high, for while volunteers are sometimes relied upon to compile initial transcriptions, they are checked by professional paleographers, and, in this case, a professional record agent (Duncan Harrington) was employed to transcribe the exemption certificates. For the Durham local historian the availability of these data will prove invaluable, while such high-quality transcriptions and thorough indexing will be a blessing for those family historians with ancestors in the area in the late seventeenth century.

For the academic with an interest in English social structure in the late seventeenth century, however, the blessings are mixed. Green provides an excellent introduction, which reveals the complexity of the process by which the Hearth Taxes were administered, how this changed over time, and how local circumstances have to be taken into account in assessing the quality of the surviving returns. County Durham, where it was the bishop whose authority held sway, appears to have had more difficulty than most other parts of England in assessing and extracting payment in the early years of the tax but shows no sign of disorderly opposition, unlike parts of Yorkshire and Northumberland. From this Green concludes that here “the collection of the hearth tax was presumably conducted in such a way that local grievances were catered for” (xviii). The presumption is reinforced by a comparison of the constables’ returns for the township of Tudhoe with those in the Exchequer, for the local return for 1670 suggests that the Exchequer list of 1674 fails to record 40 percent of the population, while the Durham evidence and that from the West Riding of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire suggest that underrecording even among the chargeable households may have reached 10–20 percent. It is the poor who will be most commonly undercounted, for they were often the most mobile section of the population and had no need to secure legal exemption by certificate, but Green also suggests that the most prosperous may well have taken the opportunity to underassess themselves by misrepresenting the number of their hearths.

Undercounting, underassessment, and inconsistency aside, there are also considerable problems of analysis with the Hearth Tax, particularly in a county like Durham. In Durham, over most of the county fully 70 percent or more of all households included just one hearth, which makes it extremely difficult to differentiate between them. In parts of Weardale the proportion of one-hearth households was somewhat lower, and this may reflect greater prosperity here but equally, as Green suggests, might also indicate a cultural difference that led to an earlier inclination to heat two rooms. Furthermore, the potential disparity between the living standards in one-hearth households is amply demonstrated by Green's comparison of Christopher Dodds, a thatcher whose movable goods were valued at £7 when he died and accommodated in two rooms, whereas John Bunting, yeoman—who also paid on one hearth—itemizes six rooms in what appears to have been a substantial farmhouse. Nor does it appear that the distinction between payers and nonpayers represents a clear dividing line (lxxxv), and even toward the upper end of the social spectrum the commonly held association between five-hearth households and gentry status does not appear to be applicable to Durham (liii).

It is difficult, therefore, to determine the degree to which the predominance of one-hearth households reflects poverty, particularly as the very poor are probably missing from the returns. It is probably also speculative to suggest that, generally, “the three and four-hearth category relates to the wealthier middling sort” (lv). Only if used in combination with other sources—particularly wills, probate inventories, parish registers, and poor law returns—can the Hearth Tax in a county like Durham shed any clear light on the lower reaches of the social order. At the upper end it is probably more reliable, and Green shows very effectively the narrowness of the county's social elite and its tendency to cluster in particular areas, with the most notable concentration within a ten-mile radius of Durham City, the seat of the bishop and a magnet for reasons of religion, preferment, and sociability. Commercial wealth generated clusters of larger households in the north of the county, while towns in general tended to include higher proportions of substantial dwellings.

The discussion of surviving houses is particularly interesting, although again limited by the poor survival of housing stock in the area and the inevitable skew toward more substantial residences. The distribution of households of different sizes are discussed at length, the results are shown in a series of maps, and explanations are offered in terms of the social and economic development of the county, itself described in a three-page summary. Statistical analysis, therefore, is kept to a minimum, and the historical context is sparse, but at least the data are made available for those who might like to analyze it differently—but why in this day and age it is only reproduced in hard copy and not on disk is hard to fathom.