I found much to love about Lewes during the
day I spent there on my recent visit to East Sussex, as you will see in this
and the blogs that follow.
Church
Twitten
Move over road, street
and boulevard, in Lewes we have the twitten. As the Oxford Dictionary defines it, a twitten is ‘a narrow path or passage between two walls or hedges’, and the word’s
origin may be Low German, from the word tweite
meaning lane or alley. If wiktionary and William Douglas Parish (from his 1875
book A dictionary of the Sussex dialect and collection of provincialisms in
use in the county of Sussex)
are to be believed, this is an exclusively Sussex word that is a corruption of betwixt
and between. The word is obviously rather old as Church Twitten, and the many
other twittens in Lewes, are the subject of a book by Kim Clark, The Twittens: The Saxon and Norman Lanes of
Lewes (Pomegranate Press, 2012).
Pipe
Passage
As well as the twitten, Lewes also has the
passage, several of them in fact, leading hither and yon.
This one had its own plaque explaining that Pipe Passage is ‘named after [a] 19th century clay pipe kiln’ and that the route ‘follows Saxon and Medieval access to [the] town wall defences’.
I found out a little more:
This one had its own plaque explaining that Pipe Passage is ‘named after [a] 19th century clay pipe kiln’ and that the route ‘follows Saxon and Medieval access to [the] town wall defences’.
I found out a little more:
... formerly
Westgate Passage. It follows the line of the old town wall which still remains in
this quarter of the town. A little way up Pipe Passage on the left is a small
piece of ground between it and the town wall. It was formerly roofed over and was
used as a workshop for making clay pipes, and the kiln for firing them still
partially remains built into the north wall which owes its survival to the fact
that it is a retaining wall for higher ground behind. [From N.E.S. Norris, ‘A
Victorian Pipe Kiln in Lewes’, Journal of
Post-Medieval Archaeology, Vol.4, Issue 1, 1970]
English’s
Passage
What can I say? The story behind English’s
Passage has eluded me.
The alleyway itself is certainly very old as one of the
buildings at the High Street end is heritage-listed and dates from the 16th
century, and these old lanes and passages are all thought to date from Saxon or
Norman times.
The very picturesque row of cottages shown in my photo at right is
not so old – the houses date from the early 19th century. They may perhaps have
been built for the managers and overseers who worked at nearby Harvey ’s Brewery.
But the reason why this
passage is named English’s will have to remain a mystery for now.
I do enjoy flushing out these
fascinating dollops of local history.
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