Were homes ever, at any time or in any place, taxed by room? (Closet tax myth)

by psychidelephant

I have recently been doing some research on the "closet tax myth" (one version being that homes had smaller or no closets because houses were taxed by room in the United States from the 17th-19th centuries). Do any of you know how or why this myth began? Or if there is any truth to it? Also, are there versions of this myth in countries other than the United States? Thank you!

fear_the_gnomes

I don't know about America but in Europe there really was a tax called the hearth tax in different places at different times (France, Republic of Netherlands, England, Ireland,...) but mostly around the 17th or 18th century. It was a taxation on the amount of fireplaces you had. They would count the chimneys and had to pay a fixed sum for each.

This sometimes led to two thing:

  1. People got better at hiding the chimney and avoided paying
  2. The rich saw this as a sort of showboting and sometimes even placed more chimneys then they actually had just to show off to the world how rich they really where.

Remember that this was in a time where the only heat in a house came from a fireplace so most important rooms in a house had a seperate one.

sources:

A. Wareham, ‘The hearth tax and empty properties in London on the eve of the Great Fire’, 2011.

P. Brood, "Grondschatting, omslagen en haardstedengeld. Een handleiding voor het gebruik van de archivalia", 1980.