After Bufford’s hanging, his body was taken by local people and exhibited in its coffin. It attracted great interest and undoubtedly the common folk at Battle looked upon, and remembered him, as a martyr. For months afterwards tension continued below the outward surface of normal life but the authorities were now alert and ready to act swiftly. In Rye, for instance, where in November 1830 a thousand people had assembled near the Workhouse when local radicals called for an anniversary demonstration in November 1831, a company of the Rifle Corps was promptly brought in from Dover and no disorder permitted.

Beside punitive measures such as the execution of Bufford, the magistrates also sought to restore peace by improving the condition of the poor. They fixed wages at 2s. to 2s. 3d. a day, which was approximately what the rioters in Brede had demanded. They also urged higher scales of relief, so that Poor Law expenditures in Brede, for instance, rose from £1765 in 1830 to £2606 in 1832. This brought an immediate response from the ratepayers of Dallington, near Battle, who sent this petition to Sir Robert Peel:

“We the undersigned farmers, tradesmen and other, rate-payers in the small agricultural parish of Dallington in the county of Sussex, consider it our duty to make known to His Majesty and the Government through you, the Secretary of the Home Department, that altho’ unable to bear it we have met the wishes of the magistrates of this district by raising the wages of the labourers and the relief of the paupers on a scale which we positively cannot continue for any length of time without bringing us all to one common ruin, and which we have done to prevent our property from being destroyed by incendiaries.

We therefore implore His Majesties Government, if they value the existence of the Middle Class of society, to take off all taxes which press on the industrious classes, otherwise there will be but two classes, the one most miserably poor and the other most extremely rich.”

Not far away at Crowhurst, on November 18^th the labourers obtained the approval of local farmers for a plan to stop James Dengate, the parish’s Collector of Government Taxes, from delivering to the Receiver General at the George In Battle the money he had ready to pay over. At the last moment however, the farmers drew back from what would have been an open act of rebellion and the labourers, too, decided not to proceed on the grounds that “it was the King’s money and it wouldn’t do.”