To this last verse Richard added a footnote: “This was written at a time when the Chartists and Trades’ Unions were rife, and the Cladpole mind was much under the evil influence of agrarian demagogues.” His own view of what should be done he expressed in another poem: “Let each stay at home and reform only one!” But even though, for him, a century and a half ago, trade unionists were the equivalent of modern militants and flying pickets, he still appreciated why these could generate a response among the labourers, and that is one reason why his books sold well amongst Sussex cottagers. It is still, however, no indication as to whether or not he was a “villain” in Chiddingly.

A more positive policy of the Chiddingly Vestry, even if only on a small scale, was an attempt to remedy the paupers’ grievance that they could not find homes with small gardens in which they could grow food for themselves. The Vestry went into house building. (Council housing, too, is another that is not just a modern concept!) On October 14^th, 1829, the Vestry reached an agreement to built three cottages at Whitesmith, by borrowing £100, secured by a mortgage on the cottages, from Mr. Richard Knight of Laughton, and contracting with Nathaniel Guy for £60 and John Milham for £40 to carry out the work.

Earlier that year, because Richard Lower “had filled the office of Assistant Overseer for the parish for the last five years to the general satisfaction of the Parish” – disagreements notwithstanding! –  the Vestry renewed his appointment, still at £40 per annum. It probably came as a surprise and possibly as a shock when in September the Magistrate ordered that the work of the Surveyors of Highways could not be palmed off onto an Assistant Surveyor, but they said nothing about the employment of a paid Assistant Overseer, even though the ancient law forbidding this had never actually been repealed. The South of England had too many poor people for it to be safe to dispense with what might be called “professional specialists”.

Especially this was so in 1829. There had been a good harvest in 1827 and although the next year’s harvest was poorer, the winter of 1828-9 had been mild. Such factors determined whether or not poor people were forced to apply for relief, and consequently the Chiddingly Poor Rate had been able to drop to 12s. in the £ in both 1827 and 1828; however, 1829 was another year of poor harvests and it was followed by a hard winter, with snow on the barns as early as October. Life proved difficult for the poor during that winter and when the next year brought in an unsatisfactory summer and possibly an even more difficult winter loomed ahead, the labourers grew frightened. They grumbled, pleaded and finally broke into violence.

In November the Chiddingly Vestry called an extra-special far-from-ordinary meeting. Its purpose: to discuss how “to give essential employment to the labouring class”; in the Chair, not one of the Guys, or Thomas Day or Robert Reeves or even the recipient of The Vicarial Tithes, the Reverend Whitworth Russell, but no less a personage than the Chairman of the County Justices, the Earl of Chichester himself. Just across the Channel from the Sussex coast the French had begun yet another revolution and deposed another king and in almost every East Sussex parish the labourers were rioting!