“Resolution 1: The Gentlemen agree to give every able-bodied labourer with a wife and two children 2/3d per day to 1^st March and 2/6d per day from 2^nd March to 1^st October and 1/6d per week with 3 children on so on..

Resolution 2. The poor are determined to take the present Overseer, Mr. Abel, out of the parish to any adjoining parish and to use him with civility.”

Abel was, of course, the Overseer who had harnessed paupers to the parish cart. Earlier complaints about him to the Magistrates had had no effect and as one labourer put it, “We would not mind being poor if we could be used with civility.” If he did not barricade himself in the Workhouse, Abel certain swore that he would shoot anyone who touched him, but privately the farmers advised him not to resist and although he later alleged that some paupers did break into the Workhouse there is no evidence that this in fact happened.Abel came out, the paupers invited him to climb into the cart, Abel chose to be dumped at Vine Hall on the London road and then the women of the parish towed him there, accompanied by a very large crowd of labourers wearing ribands in their hats and led, so it was said, by known smugglers. Several farmers standing by are said to have applauded and treated the labourers to beer. Their reward came when Mr. Hele refunded £315 of the tithe money. Part of the paupers’ reward was that not long after, Mr. Abel returned to Brede and was reinstated in the Workhouse.

Five miles further west, the Overseer at Battle was less lucky than Mr. Abel for he, too, was given a ride in a cart, towed or encouraged on by hundreds of labourers, but in his case it was a dung cart. This entertainment over, the labourers assembled in the Bull Ring, outside the Abbey Gates, and when Sir Godfrey Webster came down to give them the rough edge of his tongue and order them back to acceptable behaviour they responded by giving him a very rough, noisy reception. Sir Godfrey retreated and sent for the militia.

The soldiers, however, were some time in arriving and on the day of the Magistrates’ Meeting, when all the principal magistrates of the Division, nineteen in number, were assembled in Battle, a crowd estimated at seven hundred gathered, shouting around the building. But this time the Army did intervene. A troop of cavalry broke up the meeting, arrests were made, and a Permanent Bench under Mr. Courthope was established in the town, meeting daily until order was restored. One man, J. Bufford, was later executed.