This book is a snippet of social history laced with poetry; a tale of parish pump politics set in the frame of an ancient and still unsolved problem: the alleviation of poverty. It deals with real-life people in a Sussex parish during the first part of the nineteenth century.

It is also the life story of a considerate, cultured and sometimes irascible man: Richard Lower of Chiddingly. He was highly educated, largely through teaching himself; happily married for more than fifty years; a poet; a musician, skilled on the flute and in writing music; deeply religious; happiest when singing sacred songs with his family in the garden on a summer’s evening; an expert (self-taught) surveyor of land and drawer of maps; a fine schoolteacher; a man who bowed his knee to God but never knuckled his forehead to the gentry; and one who, despite his official duties, never lost his sympathy and understanding for the people amongst who he grew up.