It was the early 1690s and the king needed money.
King William and Parliament had brought this problem on themselves.
To gain popularity they had just got rid of a hated tax.
Now he was short of cash.
What to do?
Every home had a hearth, and the English had been paying hearth taxes one way or another,
usually to the church, since before the Norman invasion of 1066, when they were known as
‘smoke-farthings’ or ‘fumage’.
But in 1662, hearth money became statute.
Every home worth more than 20 shillings (about US$5,000 in today’s money) had to pay one
shilling twice a year for every stove, hearth or fireplace.
People who had been out of the range of direct taxes suddenly found themselves liable.
Even paupers were listed.
Tax collectors were operating on commission and ‘enforced their rights to the last farthing’.
They demanded entry into people’s homes every six months to count their fireplaces,
and so infringed on the Englishman’s sacred privacy.
Worse yet, the idea had come from France.
The English hated it, and it was a huge source of grievance when the Glorious Revolution
came in 1688.
Here was a means to quickly ingratiate the new monarchs, William and Mary, with their
people.
They abolished hearth money ‘to erect a lasting monument of their Majesties’ goodness
in every hearth in the kingdom’.
But it left a major problem.
The Dutch were owed money for equipping William’s invasion to overthrow the previous king, James
II.
There was conflict in Ireland and war on the Continent, the Nine Years War, to be paid
for.
There were allies of James II in Scotland to expel.
There was also the small matter of a currency crisis at home.
How to pay for it all?
In 1696, a solution was found.
Surprise, surprise, it came in the form of another tax: the Duty on Houses, Light and
Windows.
Otherwise known as the window tax.
Now a collector could walk past somebody’s house and count the number of windows from
outside.
He didn’t have to venture in.
No privacy was violated.
No engagement with the taxpayer was required, nor any declaration on his part.
You can’t hide windows, so it was a hard tax to avoid.
Thanks to hearth money, the infrastructure was already in place to collect the tax.
It also seemed a fair tax: the more windows somebody had, the wealthier they were likely
to be and so the greater their ability to pay.
Like so much permanent government legislation, window tax was introduced on a temporary basis.
The amounts payable were low at first, starting with a flat rate of two shillings per house
with up to ten windows.
But over the years, they crept up.
Soon, rather than pay, people began blocking up their windows.
By 1718, it was already noted that the tax wasn’t raising as much revenue as hoped.
The reaction was not to lower the tax, but to increase it.
The result was even more extreme avoidance tactics.
Homes were built with fewer windows.
Some were built with windows already bricked up, thus giving the owner the option to knock
through and glaze at a later stage, if desired.
In some cases, apartment buildings were constructed with entire floors of windowless bedrooms.
At a time when electric, gas and oil lighting had not yet been invented and light came from
the smoky flames of tallow candles or rush lights (reeds dipped in fat), blocking out
sunlight and fresh air was no small sacrifice.
A further ‘absurd impost on light’, as the medical journal The Lancet later called
it, came in 1746, when the government of King George II introduced a tax on glass.
Between them the two taxes became ‘a cause of deformity in building’, according to
John Stuart Mill, yet they guided architecture for 150 years, determining how the villages,
towns and cities of Britain and France (which would have its own ‘impôt sur les portes
et fenêtres’) would look – and, in many places, still look today.
The thresholds – or notches, as they were known – of the tax determined how many windows
a building would have.
Some aspirational villagers in Wiltshire even painted the exterior bricks of their homes
in black and white to resemble the windows that were now missing.
When the prime minister, William Pitt, tripled the tax in 1797, one carpenter reported to
Parliament that a whole street had asked him to brick or board up their windows.
The glass tax inhibited the growth of an entire industry.
Between 1801 and 1851, the United Kingdom population grew from 11 million to 27 million.
London alone saw a 170% increase in its population, from 1 million to 2.7 million.
There was a building boom to accompany the extraordinary population growth.
Yet thanks to the tax, glass production levels remained largely unchanged over the period.
Windows became a symbol of wealth, even in fiction.
‘Elizabeth saw much to be pleased with,’ writes Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice.
‘Though she could not be in such raptures as Mr Collins expected the scene to inspire,
and was but slightly affected by his enumeration of the windows in front of the house, and
his relation of what the glazing altogether had originally cost.’
Though the tax never made it to the USA, in 1798 fear of it sparked an entire rebellion
– the Fries rebellion.
When assessors in Pennsylvania rode about surveying property for the Direct House Tax,
German and Dutch settlers thought they were about to try and levy a window tax.
They rose up in an armed revolt that spread across the state and took the federal troops
of President John Adams the best part of two years to quash.
Nor did the window tax prove progressive.
‘A house of £10 rent in the country’, wrote Adam Smith, ‘may have more windows
than a house of £500 rent in London’, yet the poorer country house owed more tax.
Rural dwellers were hit hard.
But it was the urban poor who suffered most.
They lived in large tenement buildings, which, having many windows, proved heavily susceptible
to the tax.
Landlords – on whom the tax fell – simply boarded up the tenement windows to reduce
costs.
This led to the tax’s most pernicious unintended consequence: it made people sick.
The numerous epidemics of disease in cities during the Industrial Revolution – typhus,
smallpox and cholera in particular – were made worse by the cramped, damp, windowless
dwellings.
The Lancet called the tax ‘a direct encouragement to disease’.
An official scientific inquiry concluded that ‘the blocking up of the numerous windows
caused by the anxiety of their owners to escape the payment of the tax, has, in very many
instances, greatly aggravated, and has even … been the primary cause of much sickness
and mortality’.
Even so, the tax continued.
By the nineteenth century, opposition to it was everywhere.
‘The adage “free as air” has become obsolete,’ fumed Charles Dickens.
‘Neither air nor light have been free since the imposition of the window-tax.’
Campaigning against it went on for decades.
Pamphlets were handed out, songs were sung, speeches were made.
In 1845, shortly after the reintroduction of income tax, Sir Robert Peel repealed glass
taxes, but the window tax remained.
Only in 1850 was a motion finally put before Parliament to repeal it.
Legend has it that MPs cried ‘Daylight robbery!’ when the matter was debated.
The idiom has lived on as an expression for outrageous charging.
The motion, however, failed to pass.
Only after another national campaign was the tax finally repealed in 1851.
France would not repeal its version for another 75 years.
The window tax was just one tax and, in the context of history, not a particularly long-lived
one, but it is a great example of how a tax comes into being and the consequences that
follow.
In its evolution we see the typical life cycle of a tax.
It is enacted at a time of need, usually to fund some kind of war.
It is presented as temporary, but becomes permanent.
The amount payable is low at first, but increases over time.
It violates basic freedoms, in this case the right to light and fresh air.
Many go to great lengths to avoid paying it, and it thus distorts how people behave and
the decisions they make.
There are all sorts of unintended consequences, which get worse as the tax matures.
Much of the money raised is wasted or spent in a way with which the taxpayer does not
agree.
Finally people have had enough, and there is some kind of movement – a campaign, a
protest, even a revolution – to get rid of it, which government is slow and reluctant
to do.
It is too simplistic to say the window tax was good or bad.
It worked well for a while, then it didn’t.
The money raised helped pay, among other things, for the essential defence of the nation.
At its heart is the moral dilemma of so many taxes.
On the one hand, it was an invasion of private property rights, with grave unintended consequences;
on the other, it was the most practical solution at the time to pay for what some would deem
to be the vital workings of government.
We can see why Winston Churchill, among many others, described taxes as ‘a necessary
evil’.
The big question is: how much evil is necessary?