At Frith’s House, 51-year-old widower William Guy, a farmer who was rich enough to afford a housekeeper and six servants, had as his landlord a man of great consequence in East Sussex: Henry Thomas Pelham, 3^rd Earl of Chichester and for fifty years Chairman of the County’s Bench of Justices in Lewes. A Whig in politics, his greater interest lay in religion and he was President of the Church Missionary society, The Evangelical Alliance and the Church of England Temperance Society. How often his concern in religious, social and educational matters brought him from his home at Stanmer Park, just outside Brighton on the Lewes road, to his lands and tenants in Chiddingly is not known, but he was in the parish in November 1830 when he took thechair at a dramatic meeting of its Vestry. Of that, more later.

Four other non-titled gentry owned extensive parts of Chiddingly: George Molineaux Esquire, 251 acres rented to and farmed by James Hide; Edward Verral Esquire, 181 acres farmed by William Thorpe; John Woodward Esquire, 272 acres all farmed by John Knight; and J. Fuller Esquire, who “occupied” 87 acres of woodland himself and rented 206 acres to William Holman. J. Fuller Esquire was also Chiddingly’s lay impropriator, a term to be explained in the next chapter.

Chiddingly’s total area was 4095 acres 1 rood. Between them, therefore, ten men – two noble lords, five Esquires and three wealthy farmers – owned over three quarters of the parish. Ownership of the remainder, in holdings ranging from Richard Lower’s mere seventy-five poles to farms of some seventy acres, went to a score or more of different men, at least half of whom were non- Chiddinglyers. One such was John Simmons, originally of Lewes but now of Uckfield, whose daughter Matthew Henry Lower (unborn in 1821) was eventually to marry. A few small farmers, such as John Funnell, Samuel Holman and Jesse Funnell, owned their own land but most rented it, not always from an “outlander” for Widow Elizabeth Funnell owned three fields that she rented out separately. Chiddingly parish itself owned seven properties – each a house and garden – and this public ownership was the nearest the overwhelming majority of the parish’s population came to having any stake in society beyond personal effect, a few household goods and their ability to work, a commodity for which often they could find no buyer.