This book is a snippet of social history laced with poetry; a tale of parish pump politics set in the frame of an ancient and still unsolved problem: the alleviation of poverty. It is also the life story of a considerate, cultured and sometimes irascible man: Richard Lower of Chiddingly. It has a little sex, not a great deal more violence and only one execution, (and that, as it were, off-stage); but it deals with real-life people in a Sussex parish during the half-century before the railway reached Brighton after which the country was never quite the same again.

Some of the people in this story were prosperous, others suffered; some were utterly honest, others less so; they sang or cried; and many would have starved or taken to rebellion had it not been for the operation of the Poor Laws that blunted the edge of both alternatives. In the middle of this operation, the man around whom Poor Law administration revolved in the parish of Chiddingly, was the Overseer of the Poor for forty years, Richard Lower.

The poor Law and the Workhouse! It calls to mind at once Bumble the Beadle in Oliver Twist: in gold-braided hat and coat; arrogant towards those over whom he had power but toadying to his superiors; bloatedly self-important and in the end receiving only his just desserts when he found himself married to a termagant. No one less like Richard Lower could possibly have been conceived. He was highly educated, largely through teaching himself; happily married for more than fifty years; a poet; a musician, skilled on the flute and in writing music; deeply religious even when it disadvantaged him with authority; happiest when singing sacred songs with his family in the garden on a summer’s evening whilst his rustic neighbours leaned over the garden wall to listen; an expert (self-taught) surveyor of land and drawer of maps; a fine schoolteacher; a man who bowed his knee to God but never knuckled his forehead to the gentry; and one who, despite his official duties, never lost his sympathy and understanding for the people amongst who he grew up, the farm labourers of Sussex.

To us now this is, perhaps, the greatest attraction of his story, for in two long entertaining tales, each with a young labourer as its hero, he has preserved for us the tongue of Sussex, that old dialect which traced its roots back to the language of the South Saxons who greeted St. Wilfred when he came ashore at Selsey. We may welcome technological progress but we pay a price for it – an oppressive uniformity from Land’s End to John o’Groats: in architecture, food, clothes and, not least speech. All the old dialects have been swept away by the advance of electronic communication.