As he also owned lands in at least one other parish, Pevensey, Thomas Day must have been Chiddingly’s richest inhabitant; but one who, perhaps, ran him close was Thomas Guy of Place House. The 1821 Census describes him merely as a “farmer” but he owned the 248 acres he farmed and it seems that he also owned another somewhat smaller farm called Hylands half a mile westwards down the lane. At Place House, Thomas Guy’s household consisted of his wife, Mary, aged 43 – he himself was 55 – five children aged 2,4,6,8 and 10 and four servants: Richard Jenner (20), William Reed (18), Phillis Guy(11) and Frances Deacon (17), who was a younger sister to the Elizabeth over whom Richard Lower had quarreled with the Vestry in 1812. The farmhands needed to work nearly 250 acres were not included in the household. He also had a lodger who, from her age – 79 – and from her name - Mary Guy - seems to have been his mother. Down the lane at Hylands, the farmer listed as the head of household was Thomas Guy Junior, aged 18. It is too much of a coincidence not to conclude that he was Thomas Senior’s son, especially as the female Guy in his household was his sister, 19-year-old Mary (named after her mother and grandmother?). The Hylands establishment supported three servants: Jonathan Richardson, aged 30, Richard Roser, aged 26, and Sophia Brooks, aged 19, who six years earlier had been “put out” to Richard Lower as a pauper child. By 1851, the Census was describing Thomas Guy Senior, not as a “farmer” but as a “landed proprietor”. He had, it seems, achieved gentlemanly status.

Besides the Thomases – Day and Guy – two other Chiddingly farmers owned large tracts of land and farmed it themselves: Richard Hicks of Hilder’s House, with 303 acres; and James Lade of Stream Farm, with 301 acres, although ownership and occupation of the latter passed shortly after 1821 to Robert Reeves. There were also two yeomen who owned smaller tracts of land – some 40 to 60 acres freehold. These apart, most others described in the Census as farmer rented the land they farmed, but this did not mean that necessarily they were not comfortably off or even rich. Indeed, the person who farmed more land in the parish than anyone else was, somewhat surprisingly, a woman- a 64-year-old widow named Elizabeth Funnell. Even if, in practice, Park House Farm was managed by her 24-year-old son Walter, she is the one who is described in the Census as “farmer”. Beside Walter, she had two children still living at home – Mary (27) and Trayton (23) – and a grandchild, Mary Ann (12) and supported four servants: Dinah Coleman (19), Jesse Robards (16), Eliza Reed (11) and William Parks (11). Clearly again, these servants were not the hands who actually worked the farm’s over 400 acres.

Elizabeth Funnell, however, did not own Park House Farm. She rented it from the Earl of Plymouth who owned 470 acres of Chiddingly land of which he retained for his own use only a small area of woodland. He had probably acquired the land in the first instance through marrying Mary Sackville, a member of one of the richest and most powerful families in Sussex and sister to its then head, the 5^th Duke of Dorset.