Here Sir John himself and his wife recline at the back and on a slightly higher level than their daughter and her husband, who stand before them. Right at the front stands their grand-daughter. All five figures are dressed in the clothes of their time, and it is the changes these show in the fashions of succeeding generations some three centuries ago, and the skill displayed by the anonymous masons in their intricate sculpting of materials and ornaments that leave the deepest impressions in the modern visitor. The parish, however, has a legend about them. The daughter and the son-in-law stand on thick round discs that look for all the world like cheeses and these, says the legend, in fact represent the cheeses along a line of which the family was wont to walk the half mile from Chiddingly Place to the Church to ensure that their aristocratic feet were not soiled by the common clay of Chiddingly.

It is usual among writers about Chiddingly – Mark Antony Lower, for instance – to dismiss this legend as nonsense, yet it may have had a basis in fact. From Saxon times onwards all English roads were poor but in Sussex they were atrocious. Partly this was because of the isolation of the county’s settlements, hemmed in as they were by the dense Wealden forest, and partly because of the underlying clay, which in wet weather became soft, sticky and abominably heavy. In Sussex, it was said, fine ladies rode to church in coaches drawn, not by noble horses, but by the slow, heavy oxen than alone had the strength to drag such loads through the mire. Given such conditions, it is possible – if not probable – that the Jeffrays arranged for their servants to lay before them a line of stepping stones over which they could walk without sinking ankle-deep into Sussex mud , and that perhaps, if no stones were available, they chose to demonstrate their wealth by using cheeses. They would have been neither the first nor last to have emphasised their social superiority by a display of extravagance.

As it now stands the Jeffrays Memorial has been vandalised at some time in the past. When is not known, but the damage may have been inflicted after the Monmouth Rebellion, when Lord Jeffries, the Hanging Judge, executed many of Monmouth’s Protestant supporters. Sussex Protestants, wishing to revenge themselves on the Judge, may have confused “Jeffrays” with “Jeffries” and damaged the Chiddingly Memorial. On the other hand the damage may – as will be seen – not yet have occurred in 1821.