The parish officers whose duty it was to tend to the needs of the church were the Churchwardens, two parishioners elected each year, a post which Richard Lower, as Dissenter, never held. Another officer, whose duties combined lay and ecclesiastical matters, was the Parish Clerk. In 1821 this was James Potter, at 85 the oldest man in Chiddingly, but not the oldest inhabitant. That distinction went to Widow Ann Glyde, who was 87 and lived in the Parish Workhouse along with eighteen other persons, all either aged or very young.

Richard Lower was not the only Dissenter in Chiddingly. In 1815 one of the small farmers, James Dunk, with others had built a Chapel on The Dicker and that same year a labourer, George Haffenden, registered his own house as a place of Dissenting worship, probably of Primitive Methodists, a sect popular amongst poor people in Sussex. Nevertheless a majority of Chiddingly’s population looked to the parish church as the centre of worship and social life and consequently the small cluster of houses around it contained both the principal shop and the principal public house of the parish. The Shop House was run by 34 -year old John Funnell. He had a wife, Selina, four years older than himself, an infant son Harry, and two servants, who probably helped in the shop and about the house: Streatfield Pelling (very much a Sussex surname) aged 18, who later joined the Army and died a soldier in 1828; and Eliza Page, aged 19.

Across the way stood “The Six Bells”, where the Chiddingly Vestry held most of its meetings. Here the publican was Daniel White (55) victualler, with a wife Elizabeth (40) and three children: 4 -year old twins, Mary and Maria, and 3 -year old John. Two young men were also living at the inn on Census Day for whom no occupation was given, but it is probable that they were potmen or ostlers: James Pankhurst (22) and William Biddlesden (21). The latter died thirteen years later in the Lewes House of Correction.

Chiddingly had two other pubs, one serving its north-eastern half, the other its south-western. “The Gun House” in the north-east received its name from its first proprietor, a retired gunfounder from the ironworks that had flourished at Stream Farm up until about 1750 when, like the rest of the Sussex iron industry that had once supplied all England with iron, it could no longer face competition from the new, coal-based ironworks of the Midlands and the North.

The south-western inn was called “The Bat and Ball” because it adjoined a field on which cricket was played. This was an activity that occasionally lined Richard Lower’s two parishes, Alfriston and Chiddingly, as witness the following advertisement that appeared in the Sussex Weekly Advertiser on June 23^rd, 1788: