Richard and Jenny and their Sussex home

Richard and Jenny Ashcroft spent their whole lives in or around this place, Cuckmere Haven. They were married in Seaford and forcibly moved to the tiny village of Bishopstone after the enclosures.  In time they had seven children, three of whom died.  Jenny probably died in childbirth with the eighth while Richard was in Newgate Prison.

Up until his arrest Richard worked as a fisherman for the Duke of Newcastle. 

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The poignant view of the Ordinary of Newgate is online for all to see in the Old Bailey Archive:

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‘Richard Ashcroft, aged about 44 Years, was born at Lewes in Sussex. From his infancy he was bred to follow the plough, and other parts of husbandry, as his father had done before him, so that his education you may imagine was not much. At length he took to the trade of fishing for some years past, he says, at Bishopstone, in the said county, where he lived ever since he was married and left his father.

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‘His neighbours have given him the character of a quiet, harmless man till (unhappily for him) he was met in South Lane, and known by a dissolute and notorious gang of smugglers, who are become the terror of many of the inhabitants of the country.

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‘His being seen with people armed contrary to the recent Act of Parliament, (though he carried no manner of offensive weapon himself) was plainly proved against him at his trial; of which he confesseth himself very sensible, and much laments the unlucky and fatal day, not only that he was seen, but that he should ever be in such company. He persists in it to the uttermost that he never had any interest, or advantage among the smugglers.

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‘But as his employment of fishing led him down to the seaside, he was often in their company and drank with them, but protests, that by this means, and this alone it came to pass, that he was ever among them, at the time of his being with them, when sworn against, for which he suffers.

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‘While he was watching, a gang of smugglers had landed prohibited goods, and as he was going home, he met them conveying them away upon horses when the officers met the company with their cargo in South Lane. He knew –indeed, he owns – that they were about illicit business, but had not the least notion of an act, or proclamation, which might touch or affect him for being in such company.