You have probably heard of the window tax, first levied in 1696, during the reign of William III. This was long before the introduction of income taxes, and in a bid to raise money the government reasoned that the better off someone was, the bigger their house and the more windows it would have, so they taxed people based on the number of windows in their property. The upshot was that many homeowners bricked up their windows in an effort to reduce their tax bill; you can still see many such ‘blind’ windows around England today.
