Many people boarded up windows until the tax inspector had left as a way of escaping payment. But other windows were bricked up permanently, while many new houses were built with just a few windows until the tax was abolished 149 years ago. Around the same period a duty on the number of hearths in houses led to two chimneys being run into one and was quickly abandoned. And the current protests against petrol duties are by no means unique. As long ago as 1377 the first Poll Tax caused a public outcry, while in 1736 a 3p levy on barrels of beer led to the Shawfield Riot.
Current taxation is as idiosyncratic and inescapable as ever.
Gingerbread men dipped in chocolate are subject to VAT at 17.5 per cent, but those covered with caramel are not. Apparently the chocolate makes it confectionery rather than a tax-free biscuit. McVities won its argument that its product was a cake by baking a foot wide jaffa cake and passing it around in the hearing. Today a 9ft ladder is taxed in the same way as a 12ft ladder, but until the Seventies only the shorter one was taxable, making it cheaper to buy a longer ladder. Similar discrimination between budgerigar mirrors with and without bells has also been ended, as has that between food-related peanut trays and similar looking ashtrays.