After teaching for eighteen months near to his mother’s relative at Cade Street, Mark Antony moved to his father’s native village, Alfriston, and opened a new school there. Here he continued the studies in Latin and Greek which he had begun at Cade Street, and became skilled in the translation of ancient documents, of which his best known is The Annals of Battle Abbey. He also met and became a lifelong friend of an outstanding Alfristoner: John Dudeney, shepherd, self-taught antiquarian and Dissenting lay preacher; and wrote his own first book, An Historical and General Description of Sussex, which, even though a hard-backed scholarly volume by a then unknown author obtained a subscription of two hundred and fifty patrons.

It has been suggested that he commuted each day between Alfriston and Chiddingly, but it seems most likely that, as at Cade Street, he lodged near his school during the week and went home only at weekends. At some time and point, however, he made an acquaintance that gave him a different reason for travelling between the two parishes, albeit with, perhaps, a little detour, for he met and began to court an educated, flaxen-haired young lady named Mercy Holman, who was governess to the family of a wealthy farmer in Ripe. He did not, however, rush into marriage, and was still unmarried when he moved to Lewes in 1835, hired an old Dissenters Meeting House in Lancaster Street and established a school offering a “classical” education based on Latin, Greek and English Grammar with, in all probability, a strong emphasis on religious observation. The school attracted pupils from the increasing number of middle-class families in and around the county town and its success permitted him to marry Mercy Holman at Bromley, Kent, in 1838. Mark Antony had a strong sense of what was moral and proper. He helped form the Lewes Temperance Society, whose first report he wrote; and he issued a Manifesto, over the signature “A young Inhabitant”, which deprecated “the continuance or the irrational and mischievous custom of fireworks and bonfires on November 5^th.”

To have issued and publicised such a statement in, of all places, Lewes, was not so much an act of courage as one verging on the foolhardy. Sussex, especially East Sussex, has a long history of being militantly Protestant; it was outside Lewes Town Hall that Queen Mary’s Government – “Bloody Mary” as she was called – burnt the Protestant martyrs in the 16^th century. Ever since the foiling of the Catholic Guy Fawke’s Gunpowder , East Sussex and Lewes especially has celebrated the occasion with a great glee and gusto that includes not just fireworks but torchlight processions, much noise, fancy dress and great bonfires and totally ignoring modern revelations of the part played in the affair by Elizabeth’s minister, Cecil, as irrelevances. Even today, almost every village and town in East Sussex and some in West Sussex too has its Bonfire Society. Thus when the Lewes Bonfire Boys read Mark Antony’s Manifesto and then discovered the true identity of “A young Inhabitant”, they vowed to throw him into the River Ouse.He did not beard them in their bravado but took the path of discretion, stayed indoors until the issue had grown stale and escaped with his clothes still dry.