Her parents accepted the suitability of the match; so did his. There remained only the question of how he would support a family. How, if at all, he earned his living between ending school and getting married is a complete mystery. He may have been totally supported by his parents; he may have helped out with the paperwork in his father’s affairs as a bargemaster and Parish Clerk; he may have assisted Thomas Susan; he may even, seasonally, have worked as an agricultural labourer. No one now knows. What is clear is that in or before 1802 he relinquished any lingering ambition he may have held to make his way as a writer – “Poets, you know are always poor!” his mother had warned him – and decided that the skills he had to offer to the world could be most usefully employed as a schoolmaster.

To set up a school he needed: the capital to buy or rent a house and certain basic equipment such as desks, benches and books; and either a parish large enough to support two schools or one that had no school at all. The capital came to him, almost certainly, through his father’s death in 1801, either as a legacy or as a gift (or loan) from his mother. The suitable parish he found in Chiddingly, where a previously existing school had closed because its schoolmaster had died, retired or moved away. Half a mile down the lane from Chiddingly Church and therefore near to the centre of the parish, he bought a substantial, two-storeyed, whitewashed house in the hamlet of Muddles Green. Here, on February 13^th, 1803, he took up residence as a bachelor, to prepare for prospective pupils. Within two months he was ready to marry.

Both he and Mary were convinced Congregationalists, members of the Heathfield Independent Chapel. That, surely, was where they desired to marry. In fact, they married at the Anglican parish church in Berwickon April 9^th, 1803. This seeming paradox is explained by the legal position of Dissenters. One hundred and fifty years earlier Richard and Mary might have been viciously persecuted for their religious beliefs. Some Lowers in Cornwall, who were Quakers, went to prison for them. The Toleration Act of 1689 eased the persecution but left various disadvantages under which all those not members of the Established Church still suffered. Not until 1828, for instance, were Congregationalists permitted to enroll at either Oxford or Cambridge Universities, which closed those two institutions to Richard even if he had wished to continue his studies there (which he may quite well have done). All important civil posts were closed to him too. The law concerning marriage, that no such ceremony was legally binding unless performed before a clergyman of the Church of England, was not altered until 1837. Richard and Mary had to choose, therefore, between making a stand on principle by marrying in their own chapel, which would have meant that in the eyes of the law they would have been living together “in sin”, and a legal marriage in an Anglican church. They chose legality and were married by the Reverend James Clapper of Wilmington at Berwick.

At the end of their marriage day they were settled in the first, and only, house they ever called their own. They had become Chiddinglyers, in fact if not yet in spirit.