The man whose job it was to enforce this policy was, of course, the paid Assistant Overseer, if a parish had one, as many did. This, as Richard Lower’s poem quoted earlier makes clear, could get the man a reputation in the parish as a “villain”; and certainly the paid Overseers were heartily disliked by the paupers in many parishes and none more so than Mr. O. Abel in Brede, as will be seen. How Richard Lower applied the policy in Chiddingly is not recorded; whether or not he carried out the Vestry’s orders with any trace of sadistic delight or whether, wherever he could, he tempered them with humanity; but there is one clue which suggests the latter as more likely. In his Tom Cladpole’s Jurney to Lunnun Tom is berated by his mother for planning to spend all his money on a trip to London so that he will have nothing to fall back on during the winter, when work will certainly be scarce. Tom’s reply is not what it might be today, “I’ll go down to Social Security. They’ll give me something!”

“Ol’ Pinchgut den must find us work,
    For Overseer is he;
He’ll grumble when he sets us on,
    But jigger! What care we?”

Old Pinchgut! Was that what the paupers in Chiddingly called Richard Lower? Whether it was or not, it is a tribute to his honesty and his sense of honour that he could either acknowledge or invent such an unflattering, undesirable nickname and it suggests that, despite his official position, he had considerable sympathy for the paupers’ plight.

A similar understanding of labourers grievances is shown in the opening verses of his second book, Jan Cladpole’s Trip to ‘Mericur:

“One dee as I was threshin whuts,
    De sewat run down ma back;
Fir I was forced to leather aun,
    Ya see, swack arter swack.

I ‘gun to think while cloutin aun,
    An to myself I sed –
‘Tis rather hard to stiver so,
    Jes for a bit of bread;

While gentlemen do naun at all,
    But ait and roll in coaches,
Mander o’er us poor fellers here,
    An grow as fat as roaches.

So sum do naun, and we do all,
    Dis never can be right;
Darn me, uf other chaps wud help,
    We’d show um how to fight!

Here we must thrash, an plow, and mow,
    And muck about a cartin;
I wish de Unioners wud cum,
    I’d soon be off a chartin.