I don’t know what it is about my small part of Lewes that attracts Welshmen. But it does.
My cottage is located on a small twitten in the town and there are only four houses. But two of them have had Welshmen in them.
The first one was the former County Treasurer. He was a very decent bloke, more of a cricketer than a rugby man, but he was responsible for me watching the very last Welsh match in the Old Cardiff Arms Park, courtesy of the Welsh Development Agency and their VIP guest box.
It seems I had done a long forgotten favour for this worthy group and this was part of my reward. The other was receiving bunches of Daffodils on St David’s Day in the Reuters newsroom. An unusual call would come from ‘Goods In’ to tell me that flowers had arrived for me.
So I was forced to creep back through the newsroom, sheepishly grasping the yellow blooms to the hoots of laughter from my colleagues and raucous offers of a date if I was free.
The Cardiff Arms affair was equally as daft. The match was against Australia, which in those days, Wales was destined to lose. So to cloak our disappointment, the former cricketer and then chairman of the Welsh Development Agency, Tony Lewis (yes, Lewis with an i) and I laid a plan for boosting Welsh Tourism with the promotion of Welsh oysters and champagne from Welsh vineyards (yes, they do exist). Of course, all was forgotten the next day because the champagne we were using as a thinking aid was far too good.
Blow me down, no sooner did I rid myself of my neighbourly Prince of Powys than another Welshman immediately moved in.
He IS a rugby fanatic and I spend my afternoons during the Six Nations sipping his wine (not champagne), and noisily rooting for England. So quite often he will have a sly look on his face, pretending to join me but mentally calculating where Wales will stand in the championship table if it turns out England are defeated.
When the Welsh score a try he of course can hardly suppress his glee.
What does all this have to do with the naming of Lewes? Well the hammer blow came when I discovered that Lewes could be derived from a Welsh name. Yes, Welsh! All this talk of the name being Saxon is all a smoke screen, you see.
It could be that Lewes possibly comes from spelling variations of the name Llewellyn such as Llwelyn, Lewis, Lewiss, Lewess, Lews, Llewys, Llewis, Lewwis, Llewess and many more.
There were over fifty different spellings of Lewis or Lewes throughout Europe. Considered a great and ancient name, it is generally accepted as being of pre 5th century Frankish origins. It derives from the personal name Hludwig, composed of the elements hlud, meaning loud or famous, plus wig, meaning battle. Lowis or Lewis is the Anglo-French form of the name, and Lowis le Briton was entered in the Red Book of the Exchequer”, Essex, in 1166. The surname first appears on record at the beginning of the 13th Century. William Lewys was a witness in the 1267 Fines Court Rolls of Suffolk. Confusingly in Wales, as noted above, Lewis was also used as an anglicization of the Welsh name Llywelyn, from llyw, meaning leader, and eilyn, likeness.
Llewelyn ap-Madoc, alias Lewis Rede, was archdeacon of Brecon, Wales, in 1437.
Names for towns were often given after a family surname and were not recorded much before 1200 when monks began to list them. The first ever recorded name of Lewes was in the ancient Welsh Kingdom of Glywysing, Now there isn’t much of a record of the Lewes’s living in the county town. And mostly the noble family bearing that name escaped the harsh Lewes winter by fortunately scampering off to New England, Australia and Ireland.
The Lewes Coat of Arms was designed by one of the Priors of St Pancras in 1398. But since the Priory held lands far and wide, the Welsh influence could well have swayed his paint brush.
Wales came under Saxon influence after the Romans left and is logged in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle by Alfred the Great in 890, that the Saxons held sway in Wales and the rest of England.
The physical presence of Lewes the town, has been established since the 7th century, thus much of its history was concurrent with the Saxon takeover of the nation. Hence the remote possibility that a consortium of 8th century cricket and rugby players influenced the christening of Lewes as Lewes.
Have I got any other completely unsupported theories about Lewes’s name?
Well Edward 1, called Longshanks from his extra-long pins, in 1272 defeated Llewelyn ap Gruffudd to bring Wales under English rule, and a Saxon saint from Seaford had the name Saint Lewinna. Bit of a ‘loo’ in both names.
After reflection, however, either the less popular theory of the Saxon word for pasture Laes or the more accepted Hluews, meaning slopes or hills and which sounds like ‘Loos’, is probably the most likely.
My Welsh theory would need another session with Tony Lewis to get anywhere near acceptance..
So I’ll go along with Lewes, ‘lew-iss’. Lewes it shall be, although one dissenter sniffily commented in a local blog. It’s not ‘Lew-iss’ but ‘Lew-iz’.
But then, it’s a nice little town, Lewes, Loos, Hluews, so what’s in a name?
Don’t get me started on Cliffe!!
When the Welsh score a try he can hardly suppress his glee