How do parents react, who have watched four of their first five babies die before their eyes? Do they rage at the Heavens or the standards of medical knowledge, sanitation, and nursing care about which – in 1812, at least – they could do nothing?  Or do they stoically, fatalistically, accept that “God moves in mysterious way His wonders to perform”? As a fundamentalist, Richard accepted God’s Will. A year later he wrote a poem to Mary on the tenth anniversary of their wedding. It contained these lines:

When the grim tyrant threw the fatal dart
And burst those bonds that twined around yr heat
Submissively you bowed beneath the stroke
And meekly spake, what once the prophet spoke,
And in maternal tears could calmly say,
“God’s name be blessed. He gives and takes away.”

Over the years a succession of eleven and twelve-year-old Chiddingly pauper girls followed Elizabeth Deacon to the School House at Muddles Green, but none arrived to join quite so saddened a family.

During the next seven years the trauma of Alfred Ebenezer’s death faded to a sad memory and the family grew with a natural rhythm as Mary bore children at roughly two year intervals: Mark Antony on July 14^th, 1813; Joseph on August 18^th, 1815; Mary on May 31^st, 1817; and Jemima on July 2^nd, 1819. All were duly baptised at the Heathfield Independent Chapel.

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Between the births of Mary and Jemima, Richard received another non-parochial appointment as the Constable of Shiplake, which was a rung up the law-enforcement ladder from Headborough as Shiplake was the Hundred of which Chiddingly was only one of the parishes. As with the Headboroughship, there is no record of just what his duties were, but one of those recorded for other Constables in East Sussex was that of reporting to the County Justices on the state of roads and bridges in their Hundred. The Justices functioned in some ways like a modern County Council, dealing with the civil administration as well as trying indictments and lawsuits at the Quarter Sessions held four times a year in Lewes. If they ordered, say, a certain parish to repair a certain bridge, it was the Constable’s duty to see and report on the execution of the order. Another of his duties was to escort convicted felons to the Lewes House of Correction. This was a duty sometimes casually performed as, for instance, when John Bennett, Constable of Cuckfield in 1840 brought Thomas Harmer to the gaol very drunk, because, he explained to the officials who received the prisoner, he had not been able to prevent railway workers met on route from plying the sentenced man with beer and spirits. A similar explanation was advanced by Jesse Comber, Constable of Newick, for the identical state of his prisoner, Josiah Siffleet. The exact state of the Constables themselves is not on record.