For a start, two-thirds of the Chiddingly tithes did not go to a churchman at all but to A. E. Fuller Esquire, the lay impropriator, one of a class of persons whose ancestors had at some time acquired the right to certain ecclesiastical revenues either in return for services  rendered to the Church or, in some cases, by outright robbery. (Not far from Chiddingly, for instance, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, profiting from his master’s famous Dissolution of the Monasteries, took all the wealth of Lewes Priory, of which now only ruins remain.)How A. E. Fuller Esquire came to be entitled to over £500 annually from Chiddingly tithes is not known, but he also received the rent of the 36 acre Rectorial Glebe, farmed by David Guy. The Vicarial Tithes amounting to some £250 annually and the rent from the 8 acre Vicarial Glebe went to the Reverend Whitworth Russell. These figures are for 1839, when the Chiddingly vicar was one Reverend Langdale, but they seem to have applied also during the Reverend Lashman’s incumbency. With him in the Vicarage in 1821 lived his wife Frances, aged 45, and two grown-up children: Amelia (29) and Richard (22). The family’s financial and social status is signaled by the presence in their household of but one servant, 14 -year old Ely Russell, presumably a pauper boy unless he was a relative of the Reverend Whitworth Russell. (The Census description says definitely that he was a “servant”.)

A Census is a picture that freezes people at a certain instant in their lives. It shows neither their pasts nor their futures. However, because Richard Lower’s little book is an unofficial record, someone in the parish was able to annotate it at a considerably later date with some information about what did happen later, and this shows that Richard Lashman died in 1822, his mother in 1825 and his father in 1828. That left Amelia all alone, probably without any great personal income and certainly without a home, for her father’s successor would need the Vicarage. What happened to her? The unofficial annotator gives no hint that she ever married. Did she go to live with more fortunate relatives, becoming an ever lonelier, tetchier old maid, resented by those who had to support her until she died in 1853? No one knows.

The Vicarage stood next to the Church, which, right at the centre of Chiddingly, was linked by a network of lanes, bridleways and footpaths to the scattered hamlets and isolated houses that made up the parish. A somewhat damp and gloomy building, it had two features of especial interest: its spire, one of only five in Sussex built of stone; and the Jeffrays Memorial, close to which Richard and Mary Lower buried their babies.

The Memorial commemorates the family of Sir John Jeffrays, Chief Baron of the Exchequer of Queen Elizabeth I and owner of the only truly large dwelling place to have been built in Chiddingly: Chiddingly Place. This “E”-shaped Elizabethan mansion had stood on the site of Thomas Guy’s Place House but had disappeared in the 18^th century when its stones were used in the building of Martello towers erected as part of the coast defences against French invasion. The Jeffrays themselves had disappeared before that. All that remained of them in 1821 were their effigies beautifully carved in Sussex marble and still to be seen in one corner of the parish church.