Illegitimate children were another topic that surfaced occasionally in the Minutes. In November 1826, for instance, Henry Funnell agreed to pay £20 as indemnification for the bastard child of Charlotte Townshend. The terms were: £2 down; £3 at Christmas; £5 in March; another £5 in June and the final £5 in September. A note added later states that the contract was punctually fulfilled, which suggest that this Henry was not the Henry Funnell identified in the 1821 Census as a labourer, who would have been most unlikely to have been able to pay out the £20 in less than a year – unless, of course, some richer Funnell, like Widow Elizabeth, came to the rescue of the family’s good name.

In another bastardy case four years later, Jonathan Noakes similarly agreed to pay in installments for the maintenance of J. Elphick’s child, which was already four years old, but what happened in the Phillis Reeds case, discussed at the same Vestry meeting, is not known. Richard Lower was instructed to settle the bastardy, i.e. to decide who the father was, but later Minute entries offer no clues as to whether or not his enquiries proved successful.

To the Vestry, bastardy was not just a matter of morals. A woman who gave birth to too many illegitimate children could be arraigned for lewdness, but what was of greater concern to the parish was that an unsupported bastard would almost certainly become a charge upon the Poor Rate. If some man could be proved to have been the child’s father, then he could be made to foot the bill for its maintenance – unless, of course, he too turned out to be a pauper and already on parish relief. Poor Law Relief and the Poor Rate were the Vestry’s overriding concern and one that filled page after page of Richard Lower’s Minute Book.

The Chiddingly Poor Rate had hit a peak of 22s. in the £ in 1818. After that, as in almost every other parish in Southern England, it came down sharply and from 1820 to 1833 varied from 12s. up to 13s. 6d. only. This, however, did not mean that poverty had disappeared nor the absolute number of paupers decreased. In 1810, when the Poor Rate levied had been 19s. in the £, the Vestry had had to find takers for nineteen pauper children “put out”. At its meeting on February 12^th, 1824, when the current Poor Rate was a mere 13s. in the £, the Vestry had to list no less than thirty-seven pauper children to be offered for service: twenty-two boys, aged 10 to 18, and fifteen girls, aged 10 to 17. Two months later it took on Richard Lower as the paid Assistant Overseer. Only two counties in England had a higher percentage of paupers than Sussex and Chiddingly was no exception to the general county average.