It is no wonder that a Sussex man holding such heretical views on England’s national game was sometimes unpopular in his own parish.

His view of foxhunting also probably helped to reinforce the antipathy that some of the farmers felt towards him because of his Dissenter’s beliefs and intellectual airs. They were views that he probably expressed in conversation. He certainly stated them in verse:

Said Joan to John, “Those men in red
    For foxes take much pains.
I fear they’ll fall and brake their head
    And shed abroad their brains.”

But honest John was better taught
    And thus replied to Joan:
“Hunters, old girl, go neck or nought –
    But as for brains – they’ve none!”

Chiddingly’s wealth came from agriculture, the produce of farmers and labourers, although proportionately the latter received considerably less of it. Some of that wealth was appropriated by land-owning gentry by virtue of their titles to the land; some of it went to the Parson and the Schoolmaster for intellectual services; some to the shopkeepers for goods that Chiddinglyers either could not or would not make or grow for themselves;some to the victuallers for providing places of convivial social gathering; and some went to the artisans who supplied the technical back-up needed by 19^th century agriculture.

Assessing the relative values of these by the number of servants in the households, the most affluent was Elphick, the master miller, who had two. Six years before the Census he had suffered a tragic bereavement: his teenage son had been caught in the mill’s machinery and crushed to death so swiftly  that he had time to cry out only one word – “Father!”. None of the other four millers in the parish had servants, so they were probably employees of Elphick’s rather than master-millers themselves.

For similar reasons, two of the men described as blacksmiths were probably assistants, and possibly another who had one servant, but the man whose household contained both a servant and an apprentice was clearly a master-smith. Carpenter Richard Guy, as we have seen, had a servant, but not so the other four Chiddingly carpenters; nor its millwright, clocksmith, cooper, gunsmith, wheelwright, carter, carrier or either of its two tailors, two bricklayers or two weavers. One of the latter was surnamed “Lower” but no relationship between him and Richard can be traced. They had, however, one macabre affinity. Like Richard and Mary, Weaver Lower and his wife were forced to watch helplessly as three babies in succession died before their eyes.