1700 To The Present Day

 
Harsher conditions were to follow the Napoleonic war which ended in 1815, when rapid industrialisation and improvements in agriculture linked to high inflation, led to social unrest. Writing in 1834, John Ellman, the Sussex sheep farmer, referred back to Arthur Young and wrote 'unfortunately the reverse is the case now; the rates in Sussex are about the highest in the kingdom; and unless some strong measures are adopted on this all important subject, the rates in the Weald of Sussex will soon be absorbed in the poor rate . . Let us hope that some plan may be adopted to make the lower classes feel they must depend on their own exertions'.
 
The plan adopted by the Government was the 1834 Poor Law Act, which aimed to reduce the costs and to discourage the poor from seeking relief unless they were destitute. The Act also required parishes to join together in poor law unions round a workhouse. In 1833-4 Heyshott contributed £53 to the cost of Sutton Union to which Heyshott belonged but, by 1841-2 the policy of reducing costs must have been effective, because only £23 was contributed by Heyshott to the Sutton Union workhouse. This workhouse building is now a private house in Sutton, south east of Petworth. Most of the poor rate was spent, at this time, on paying men for parish work, which included work on the farms, in effect subsiding the local employers, the farmers.
 
The anti-protectionist tract The Hungry Forties, based to a large extent on conversations between Richard Cobden's daughter, Jane, and the people of Heyshott, was published in 1904 by her husband, Thomas Fisher Unwin. It gives a harsh impression of the lives of the low-wage families in Heyshott in the 1840s, seen through the memories of elderly people. Charles Robinson recalled that 'parish work' was only seven shillings per week for work in the fields. David Miles referred to the plight of farm labourers who were dependent on the farmers both for their low paid employment and the poor relief through the Vestry Meeting, on which the same farmers were well represented, Moving to another parish was no solution, because poor relief was given only to people with the right of settlement in their local parish. He summed it up as 'Then what cudn't work ad to go on the parish or starve'.
 
The following ballad, circulated by the Anti-Corn Law League in the 1840s, indicates the depth of feeling at this time:

The haughty possess the land And wield oppression's rod, In spite of that divine command Found in the word of God; The Corn Laws petrify their hearts And make the nation groan, For when the people cry for bread They only get a stone.

Then open every British port And let the poor be fed. No longer see your children starve And die through want of bread.