Cambridge in the Summer

This is one of the many fascinating history lessons you can find just walking the campuses at the University of Cambridge. In this example, the window was bricked in. There as some who disagree, but the general view is that there was a tax (common in Europe at the time) between 1695 and 1891 based on the number of windows each place had. (There was a similar “hearth tax” and the premise was that richer people had more windows or hearths and should be taxed more.) Many were opposed to window tax and thus the term “daylight robbery” came into use.