Parishes like Chiddingly and Alfriston in the 18^th and 19^th centuries were particularly hard-pressed, for agricultural wages in Sussex were lower than in almost any other county. During the 18^th century especially, the heyday of Sussex smuggling, one night’s tub-carrying for the smugglers could reward a labourer with as much as he would earn in a week working for a farmer – if, that is, he could find one who needed hired labour. If he was a “toughie”, able to wield the heavy club that Sussex folk called a “bat”, protecting those carrying the run goods from seizure by Excise officers, he received four times as much. He was also often a folk hero, for the ultimate threat of being hung in chains from a gibbet at the crossroads deterred few Sussex labourers from siding actively or passively with the smugglers.

According to Mr. Majendi, reporting to the Commission on the Poor Laws in 1832, smuggling increased the Poor Rate because it paid a man, especially in winter when work was usually in short supply, to rely on occasional nights carrying for the smugglers rather than to find employment. He could then honestly – well, nearly honestly – claim to be unemployed and draw parish relief. “Moonlighting”, it seems, is not the purely modern invention which many of us may think it is, except, of course, that the smugglers preferred a moonless to a moonlit night for their operations. As the condition of the poor deteriorated, so crime increased. In Dorset, for instance, population rose 40% between 1792 and 1831, but Poor Law expenditures rose by 214% and expenses for prosecuting crime by 2135%. By far the commonest rural crime was poaching, which was always strictly punished. The Sussex Weekly Advertiser, in the week before it published its analysis of a labourer’s budget, reported a fine of £20 – a year’s wages for a labourer – being imposed on a man who had poached two hares from the Earl of Sheffield’s estate at Fletching to provide food for his family. The alternative to the fine was prison. In fact, the man managed to decamp and avoided either punishment.

In each parish, those who were not paupers had to support those who were. The Law said so. The money for this purpose was raised by the Poor Rate which, just as is still the practices with local government rates, was a levy on the notional rentable value of all property, to be paid by the occupier of that property not the owner, unless the occupier and the owner were the same person. The men whose duty it was to see that this Rate was correctly collected and fairly distributed under the direction of the parish Vestries, were the Overseers. No wonder it was the thankless task that Richard Lower described: