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Concept
Lewes
Summary
Lewes (ˈluːɪs) is the county town of East Sussex, England. The town is the administrative centre of the wider district of the same name and the location of East Sussex County Council at the county hall.
A traditional market town and centre of communications, in 1264 it was the site of the Battle of Lewes. The town's landmarks include Lewes Castle, Lewes Priory, Bull House (the former home of Thomas Paine), Southover Grange and public gardens, and a 16th-century timber-framed Wealden hall house known as Anne of Cleves House. Other notable features of the area include the Glyndebourne festival, the Lewes Bonfire celebrations and the Lewes Pound.
The place-name 'Lewes' is first attested in an Anglo-Saxon charter circa 961 AD, where it appears as Læwe. It appears as Lewes in the Domesday Book of 1086. The addition of the suffix seems to have been part of a broader trend of Anglo-Norman scribes pluralising Anglo-Saxon place-names (a famous example being their rendering of Lunden as Londres, hence the modern French name for London).
The traditional derivation of Læwe, first posited by the Tudor antiquarian Laurence Nowell, derives it from the Old English language word hlæw, meaning 'hill' or 'barrow', presumably referring to School Hill (on which the historic centre of Lewes stands) or to one of the five ancient burial mounds, all now levelled, in the vicinity of St John sub Castro.
However, this etymology has been challenged by the Swedish philologist Rune Forsberg on the grounds that the loss of the initial in hlæw would be unlikely phonologically in this context. He suggested that the name Læwe instead derives from the rare Old English word lǣw ('wound, incision'), and reflects the fact that from the top of School Hill Lewes overlooks the narrow, steep-sided 'gash' where the River Ouse cuts through the line of the South Downs. This theory was endorsed in 2011 by A Dictionary of British Place Names.
A third possibility has been advanced by Richard Coates, who has argued that Læwe derives from lexowia, an Old English word meaning 'hillside, slope' (of which there is no shortage in the Lewes area).
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