The man appointed to the post was Richard Lower, at a salary of £20 per annum. This was a saving on the Poor Rate, to re-appoint him at only half the previous salary, but the justification was, presumably, that he would now have less duties, since much of the Poor Law administration would come from Hailsham. Certainly he no longer had to supervise the parish Poor House. The Hailsham Union made use initially of existing workhouses at Herstmonceaux, Hailsham, Warbleton and Hellingly, until a new purpose-built workhouse for the whole Union was ready for use in Hellingly in 1843. (Situated in Upper Horsebridge, it was closed in 1932 and later demolished to make way for a council estate.) In Chiddingly, however, the Overseer still had to carry out the duties listed in the resolution above, receive and process applications for relief before they went to Hailsham and, under the Guardian’s instructions, distribute relief to the numerous, non-able-bodied paupers who had not been required to enter the workhouse. A fifty-per-cent cut in his salary, therefore, hardly seems to have been justified. In 1846, however, he was allowed a commission of 4d. in the £ in the collection of the Poor Rate, but whether this was on top of or in lieu of his existing salary is not clear. The commission amounted to only £10 or so a year, for by then Chiddingly’s contribution to the Union Poor Rate had dropped to around £600, compared with an average expenditure per year from 1831 to 1834 of £1,185.

This considerable drop was due in part at least to the stringent reductions in Poor Law Relief made under the New Poor Law, but it may also have resulted in part from a revaluation of all Chiddingly properties, which, to the delight of some if not all of the parish’s ratepayers, had at last taken place in 1839. They had the Tithe Commutation Act to thank for the completion of the plan that had proved abortive in 1833.

On December 14^th, 1836, the Chiddingly Vestry passed a resolution which said that in furtherance of the New Act – by which it was meant the Poor Law Amendment Act – all ratable property in the parish should be “appraised and valued by a committee of ratepayers.” Here was a resurrection of the ploy, attempted three years earlier, of carrying through a revaluation on the cheap, although the reason stated in the resolution for adopting this procedure was that Chiddingly ratepayers would be more familiar with the parish’s properties than strangers. The Bench of Magistrates, however, was not deceived. It promptly scotched the idea by declaring it illegal. Consequently the Vestry – with reluctance, no doubt – on October 26^th, 1837, decided to employ Mr. Gladman of Lewes to value the whole parish for £50. The sale of parish houses was postponed.

It seems, though there are no specific references to support the conjecture, that the Chiddingly Vestry was in a state of feud with the Board of Guardians in Hailsham, for when on January 25^th, 1839, it declared a Poor Rate of 2s. in the £ - twenty years earlier it had been 22s! – it also recommended that there should be a reduction of “12½% on Valuation”, i.e. it was saying that the parish was overvalued and paying more that its fair share into the Union’s coffers. At the same meeting it “was NOT agreed to collect the Rates and Rents, etc. for the Union.”