After the millers and the blacksmiths the most useful, non-agricultural services in the parish appear to have been supplied by the cordwainers, for Chiddingly supported no less than eight of these, of whom one had a servant and another an apprentice. Boots, clearly, were of vital importance to a rural community, especially one in Sussex where, Daniel Defoe alleged, the mud was so thick that fold had longer legs than most simply from the effort of pulling their feet out of it! For the poor, boots had a further significance. They were their only means of transport. The better-off travelled on horseback or in wheeled vehicles ranging from the large, highly decorated coaches of the titled landowners to the rickety-rackety gigs and the heavy waggons and carts of farmer and carriers, but the poor walked.

All could be seen at some time or other on the two turnpikes that cut across the southern edge of the parish: The Eastbourne-Uckfield (now the A22) and the Battle-Lewes, which passed through Hailsham to join the former road at Polegate and then forked left towards Ringmer just beyond Golden Cross. Fifteen feet’s wide of smooth macadam, just wide enough for two coaches to pass, providedvastly better travelling than the ruts or mud of parish lanes, whilst riders and pedestrians could use the broad grass verges on either side. Along the turnpikes rattled galloping horn-blowing mail coaches, more sedate family vehicles, lumbering waggons and sporty dogcarts, hard-driven by rich young bloods; but for the most part, they passed Chiddingly by and had little relationship to the lives of most of its population.

It was not an intellectually stimulating parish. It had one gardener, presumably employed by one of the wealthy farmers; and a nurse, 29 -year old Mary Burton, who may however simply have been a visitor caught in the parish by the Census, like Philadelphia Kim, Elizabeth Funnell’s guest at Park Farm. But it had no doctor, no lawyer, no professional or intellectual people of any description except the parson and the schoolmaster. About the latter, probably most of the farmers held the same views as George Bernard Shaw, although they would not have been capable of expressing them so succinctly: “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach!” In fact within the next five years the farmers were to find Richard Lower’s services indispensable.