In 1690 Parliament granted a tax of 14 shillings on every hearth in the kingdom payable by both landowners and tenants to raise money for the army. Only hospitals and the poor living on charity from the parish were exempt. There were huge difficulties in collecting the tax, particularly in highland or remote areas. Collection dragged on for several years until August 1694 when a proclamation called for all hearth lists to be sent to the treasury before 1 October.
As a source, the hearth lists (NRS reference E69) must be used with caution. They are generally arranged by county and then parish or by landed estate. The rolls for the following counties contain lists of householders (some arranged by estate or place): Angus, Ayr, Argyll (but with some areas missing), Bute, Berwick, Clackmannan, Dumbarton, East Lothian, Fife, Kincardine, Lanark, Midlothian, Perth, Renfrew, Roxburgh, Stirling, Sutherland, West Lothian and Wigtown.
The rolls for the counties of Aberdeen, Banff, Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Moray, Nairn, Peebles and Selkirk give only the total number of hearths surveyed and money collected in each parish or estate. The roll for Inverness-shire consists mainly of a summary of a small number of parishes without listing inhabitants but includes a list of burgesses or inhabitants of the town of Inverness and a list of poor in the parishes surveyed.
There are no rolls for Orkney, Shetland, Caithness, Ross and Cromarty in Exchequer records. Some hearth books were never handed in to the Exchequer and a few survive among collections of private papers. The Leven and Melville papers (NRS reference GD26/7/300-391) contain lists for parishes in Dumfriesshire, Fife, Edinburgh, and Shetland. Lists for parishes in Ross-shire are in the Cromartie papers (NRS reference GD305/1/164).
The hearth tax rolls from Exchequer records (NRS reference E69), along with some of the assessed tax rolls are available online on the ScotlandsPlaces website.
