Town in East Sussex, England
Lewes
Every 5 November, Lewes sets fire to effigies, rolls burning tar barrels through the streets and hurls one into the river. It is Britain's wildest bonfire night.
Key information
- County
- East Sussex
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Bonfire Night, Harveys Brewery, Thomas Paine, a Norman castle with two mottes
- What locals are called
- Lewesians
- Famous people
- Thomas Paine, Gideon Mantell
- Football clubs
- Lewes FC (the Rooks)
About Lewes
The town that sets itself on fire
Most of Britain marks 5 November with a sparkler and a sausage roll. Lewes goes further. Torch-bearing processions wind through the narrow streets in the evening, with marchers dressed as smugglers, Vikings, Zulu warriors and 17th-century Protestants. Several bonfire societies take part, each with its own costumes, banners and bonfire site on the edge of town. Burning tar barrels are rolled through the streets and one is hurled into the River Ouse. The societies also build giant effigies. The Pope and Guy Fawkes are traditional, but topical political figures often join them, and they go up in flames too. The night is more than the Gunpowder Plot. Seventeen Protestants were burned at the stake in Lewes between 1555 and 1557, under Mary I, and the societies remember them with a procession of flaming crosses. That is why Lewes treats the night so seriously.
A castle with two hills
Lewes Castle was begun by William de Warenne, one of William the Conqueror's closest companions, soon after 1066. Unusually, it has two mottes, or artificial mounds, a few hundred metres apart rather than one. From the keep you can look over the Ouse valley and the chalk of the South Downs. In 1264 the town was the setting for the Battle of Lewes. Simon de Montfort's rebel barons defeated and captured Henry III just outside it, which briefly made de Montfort the most powerful man in England. De Warenne and his wife Gundrada also founded Lewes Priory, the first Cluniac monastery in England. It grew into one of the grandest religious houses in the country. The priory was dissolved in 1537, and its great church was demolished the following year by Giovanni Portinari, working for Thomas Cromwell. Today only ruins remain in a park south of the town.
Tom Paine's local pub debates
Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and Rights of Man, lived in Lewes from 1768 to 1774. He worked as an excise officer and joined the Headstrong Club, a debating society that met at the White Hart. Paine lived at Bull House, at 92 High Street, and a statue of him stands in the town today. Soon after leaving Lewes he sailed for America, where his writing helped fuel the revolution. The town has never forgotten him. The Lewes Pound, a local currency launched in 2008, put Paine and other local figures on its notes. Another Lewes-born man left a mark on science. Gideon Mantell, born in 1790, was a doctor and fossil hunter who helped identify the dinosaur Iguanodon in the 1820s.
Avalanche in Sussex, and other oddities
On 27 December 1836, a huge mass of snow slid from the chalk slope above the Cliffe area and crushed a row of cottages in South Street. Eight people died, making it the deadliest avalanche ever recorded in Britain. The Snowdrop Inn, built nearby, is named after it. Lewes also has a house given as a divorce settlement. Anne of Cleves House, a timber-framed Tudor building, was part of the property Henry VIII granted Anne when their marriage was annulled, though she never lived in it. The town's hilly streets slope down to the river, and ancient passages known as twittens run between them. Some are so narrow that two people struggle to pass.
Beer, Rooks and a first for equal pay
Harveys traces its brewing business in Lewes back to 1790, and its Sussex Best Bitter is the pint most closely associated with the town. The company moved to its present Bridge Wharf site beside the Ouse in 1838, and the ornate Victorian tower brewery was built in 1881. It is one of the best-known sights on the riverbank. Lewes FC, nicknamed the Rooks, play at the Dripping Pan, a ground squeezed beneath the castle and the Downs. The club is owned by its supporters. In 2017 it announced that its men's and women's teams would receive equal budgets, a first for a professional-level football club in England. A short walk away, Mount Caburn, an Iron Age hillfort on the Downs, offers some of the best views in Sussex.
Related articles
Bonfire Night
Every year Britain burns a man who tried to blow up Parliament, and in Lewes the fire extends to flaming barrels in the river and a march of thousands.
Culture & Traditions
The Gunpowder Plot
The most famous plot in English history was foiled because of a letter, a cellar full of firewood and 36 barrels of gunpowder, and we still burn the man who guarded them.
History