1700 To The Present Day

 
Widow Boxall was supported for several years at five shillings (25p) per month and piglets and bushels of flour were given to others. Vagrants, without the right of settlement in the parish in which they were found begging, were ordered to be returned to their native village. In 1758, Quarter Sessions ordered the constable, headborough and tythingmen of Heyshott to take Mary Repley found 'wandering and begging' in Heyshott to Haslemere as the first town in the next 'precinct through which she ought to pass' on the way to Witley where she had been in the poor house.
 
By the 1780s, more people were being helped and in 1788, £189 was spent. The impression given in the records is of local benevolence. Although assistance in kind was then being reduced, in 1775 the overseers paid one and six pence 'for a bottle of Geneva for John Ilcombe'. In 1795, two men from Heyshott appeared with men from Cocking before the county justices for threatening to attack the overseer of the poor for Cocking in protest at the low level of pay for parish work. The churchwardens and the overseers also had to identify suitable men for militia service when the Regiment of Sussex Militia was embodied under the Duke of Richmond from 1792 onwards. In 1795, Heyshott and six other parishes contributed a total of £13 for the cost of a bounty for a sailor for the Royal Navy at a time when 172 men had to be found for the Navy by the County of Sussex.
 
The third Earl of Egremont, who suceeded his father in 1763, was less active in national politics, but he played a major role in Sussex society,as Lord Lieutenant, patron of the arts, promoter of canals and agricultural improvements, supporter of the new madel workhouse in Eastbourne and generous benefactor to the poor. In Heyshott, he increased his ownership of land assessed for land tax from 7% in 1780 to 56% in 1831. This holding, consolidated further in the 1830s, laid the foundation for most of the agricultural and woodland being in one ownership, initially the Leconfield estate and, since 1926, the Cowdray estate, which has had the effect of preserving the layout and general apperience of Heyshott.
 
During this period, some land was held by other major landowners, such as Lords Montague and Selsey, but the number of small freeholders and tenant farmers in Heyshott fell from 40 to 22 between 1781 and 1830. Among those who left Heyshott were the Cobdens who had owned Bex Mill and farmed dunford from the end of the eighteenth century.
 
The Earl of Egremont was a leading member of the Board of Agriculture and he entertained and corresponded with Arthur Young, its Secretary. Both the Earl and Young were strong advocates of improved methods of agriculture and, reflecting on the prosperity of Sussex in the 1790s, Young wrote 'Rates for the maintenance of the poor in Sussex collectively taken are not comparatively so high as in other counties where manufacturers prevail'.