is Elizabeth Parkinson's study of the establishment of the tax and the complexities of its administration in the period 1662–66. This work provides assistance with deciphering the technical details of hearth tax documents, which otherwise might appear to be little more than lists of names and numbers. Approaches to hearth tax research A principal focus of interest in the hearth tax lies in its application for understanding the distribution of wealth among social ranks within geographical areas. The method of connecting bands of hearth numbers to social categories was pioneered by William George Hoskins, looking at the city of Exeter. His system has subsequently been adjusted by local historians and, as Tom Arkell noted, these adaptations depend upon a 'particular locality's structure, but this diversity, combined with too many variables, prevents effective comparison between most of these [local] studies'. During the 1980s Arkell's discussion of the eight hearth tax records for Kineton hundred in Warwickshire enabled detailed comparisons to be made between the data for 1662–1666 and 1669–1674, and to test the extent of the coverage of each record. This led him to conclude that 'the proportions of different hearth tax categories remained remarkably stable for the hundred's six best assessments'. A decade later, Margaret Spufford cleared a path for local historians interested in studying local variations in wealth and poverty at county and parish levels, and set out the relevance of the hearth tax to architectural history and genealogy. She developed Hoskins' argument that the numbers of hearths in a household could be equated with levels of personal wealth, and that by organising the properties into groups determined by the number of hearths, historians could assess patterns of wealth and poverty which distinguished between social categories. She placed this system within a national template and tested the divergences in wealth between counties, areas within counties, and parishes. Tom Arkell responded in The Local Historian, putting forward an alternative approach which drew upon an array of published and unpublished data. First, he argued for the aggregation of data from different returns in the mid-1660s and the early 1670s to produce more reliable statistics, thereby overcoming the problems of damaged or incomplete records. Second, he suggested that the percentage of households with three hearths and above provided a clear way of identifying regional variations in wealth, especially when groups of parishes with broadly similar percentages were grouped together into sub-regions. Third,