Ahearth (/hɑːrθ/) is the place in ahome where afire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and forcooking, usually constituted by a horizontal hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos (a low, partial wall behind a hearth),fireplace,oven, smoke hood, orchimney. Hearths are usually composed ofmasonry such asbrick orstone. For millennia, the hearth was such an integral part of ahome, usually its central and most important feature, that the concept has beengeneralized to refer to a homeplace or household, as in the terms "hearth and home" and "keep the home fires burning". In the modern era, since the advent ofcentral heating, hearths are usually less central to most people's daily life because the heating of the home is instead done by afurnace or a heatingstove, and cooking is instead done with akitchen stove/range (combinationcooktop andoven) alongside otherhome appliances; thus many homes built in the 20th and 21st centuries do not have hearths. Nonetheless, many homes still have hearths, which still help serve the purposes of warmth, cooking, and comfort.
Before the industrial era, a common design was to place a hearth in the middle of the room as an open hearth, with the smoke rising through the room to asmoke hole in the roof. In later designs which usually had a more solid and continuous roof, the hearth was instead placed to the side of the room and provided with achimney.
In fireplace design, the hearth is the part of the fireplace where the fire burns, usually consisting offire brick masonry at floor level or higher, underneath thefireplace mantel.
The wordhearth derives from anIndo-European root,*ker-, referring to burning, heat, and fire (seen also in the wordcarbon).[1] Inarchaeology, a hearth is a firepit or otherfireplace feature of any period. Hearths are commonfeatures of many eras going back to prehistoric campsites and may be either lined with a wide range of materials, such as stone or left unlined. They were used for cooking, heating, and the processing of some stone, wood, faunal, and floral resources. Occasionallysite formation processes—e.g., farming or excavation—deform or disperse hearth features, making them difficult to identify without careful study.
Lined hearths are easily identified by the presence offire-cracked rock, often created when the heat from the fires inside the hearths chemically altered and cracked the stone. Often present are fragmentedfish andanimal bones,carbonizedshell,charcoal, ash, and other waste products, all embedded in asequence ofsoil that has been deposited atop the hearth. Unlined hearths, which are less easily identified, may also include these materials. Because of theorganic nature of most of these items, they can be used to pinpoint the date the hearth was last used via the process ofradiocarbon dating. Although carbon dates can be negatively affected if the users of the hearth burned old wood or coal, the process is typically quite reliable. This was the most common way to cook, and to heat interior spaces in cool seasons.
In theByzantine Empire a tax on hearths known askapnikon was first explicitly mentioned for the reign ofNikephorus I (802–811) although its context implies that it was already then old and established, and perhaps it should be taken back to the 7th century AD. Kapnikon was a tax raised on households without exceptions for the poor.[2]
In England, a tax on hearths was introduced on 19 May 1662. Householders were required to pay a charge of twoshillings per annum for each hearth, with half the payment due atMichaelmas and half atLady Day. Exemptions to the tax were granted, to those in receipt ofpoor relief, those whose houses were worth less than 20 shillings a year and those who paid neither church nor poorrates. Also exempt were charitable institutions such as schools andalmshouses, and industrial hearths with the exception of smiths' forges and bakers' ovens. The returns were lodged with theClerk of the Peace between 1662 and 1688.[3]
A revision of the Act in 1664 made the tax payable by all who had more than two chimneys.
The tax was abolished byWilliam III in 1689 and the last collection was for Lady Day of that year. It was abolished in Scotland in 1690.[3]
Hearth tax records are important tolocal historians as they provide an indication of the size of each assessed house at the time. The numbers of hearths are generally proportional to the size of the house. The assessments can be used to indicate the numbers and local distribution of larger and smaller houses. Not every room had a hearth, and not all houses of the same size had exactly the same number of hearths, so they are not an exact measure of house size.Roehampton University has an ongoing project which places hearth tax data in a national framework by providing a series of standard bands of wealth applicable to each county and city.
Published lists are available of many returns and the original documents are in thePublic Record Office. The most informative returns, many of which have been published, occur between 1662–1666 and 1669–1674.
InGreek mythology,Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, while in Roman mythologyVesta has the same role.[4]
In ancient Persia, according toZoroastrian traditions, every house was expected to have a hearth for offering sacrifices and prayers.[5]
In traditionalAlbanian folk beliefs, theVatër, the home hearth, is a spiritual link between past, present, and future generations of thetribe, linkingancestors to the family today and todescendants tomorrow.
Hearth is also a term for a family unit, or local worship group, in theHeathen religion.[citation needed]
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