The wonder is not that the labourers in most of the southeastern counties rioted in 1830, but that they had not done so long before. For many years they had suffered from a poverty that came from unemployment, under-employment, low wages and food prices kept artificially high by the Corn Laws which penalised or prohibited the import of foreign grains and whose repeal was fiercely resisted by landowners and farmers until 1848.

The farm workers themselves made little concerted effort before 1830 to raise their own wages by forming themselves into trade unions. (The famous attempt of Dorset men which resulted in the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs did not occur until 1833.) At least one attempt was made before 1800, however, and surprisingly this was in Richard Lower’s native parish of Alfriston, which, perhaps, can claim to have been the birthplace of agricultural trade unionism. In November 1792, a Lewes newspaper reported a meeting of labourers in Alfriston “to augment wages and reduce the exorbitant price of corn. So they avow. They have met two or three times at a public house with a Mr. Trigger in the chair.” Later the same paper reported that the number of would-be trade unionists had risen to two or three hundred. And then nothing. Silence. What happened next? No-one now knows.

Perhaps it was what happened some sixty years later not far away at East Dean, between Seaford and Beachy Head. There a meeting of labourers gathered to discuss forming a trade union. Their branch needed a secretary who did not work for a farmer and could not therefore be sacked for his temerity, and so they elected to the post Tom French, striker for Hills the blacksmith. But Tom lived in a cottage owned by a farmer. That very evening of the day that the union had been formed and Tom had taken home the new minute book, a message was conveyed to him from his landlord: “Burn that book or be evicted!” East Dean’s incipient unionism collapsed. So likely did Alfriston’s and in 1830 Sussex had no agricultural trade unions.