A Concise History Of The Creation Of Glass Tax In England And Scotland
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King William the third introduced a window tax into his Kingdom in 1696. Income tax was not in existence then as the populace considered details of their own income to be private and not a matter for the King to worry about. The window tax was introduced to get around this problem. Read on to discover more about the historical facts about an old taxation system on windows in the United Kingdom.
Of his subjects, the King decided that the most fair method of taxation would be by looking at the size of people's houses. Each person who owned a house would have to pay a fixed fee of 2 shillings. This is about 10 pence in the new system. As well as this, if the house was large and contained more than 10 windows, there were extra taxes to pay.
If the house had between ten and twenty windows, then this extra tax was 4 shillings and anything over twenty windows had to pay eight shillings. Later, as the king wanted to increase the tax, he reduced the minimum number of windows to be taxed from ten to seven. This was further changed in 1825 to eight windows.
Poor residents of course did not have to pay this extra window tax. If they were eligible to receive church charity, for example, then they would be exempt from paying.
However, in the 17th and 18th centuries, many larger houses could be seen with bricked up windows. This is an obvious attempt to avoid this window tax. In Scotland, after William Pitt the Younger introduced this tax in the 1780s, the windows were painted black with white frames. This was also done in order to avoid paying the tax. These popularly became known as Pitt's pictures. Examples of these windows can still be seen in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh.
It may be possible that in contrast to this, many of the richer families actually had extra windows designed into their houses. They commissioned properties with as many windows as possible. Even blank walls had window facades to create the look of more windows.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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