on the 13th of May. Efforts at reconciliation having failed he led his army against the town, which he hoped to surprise, early on the following day. His plan was to direct his main attack against the priory of St Pancras, which sheltered the king and his brother Richard, earl of Cornwall, king of the Romans, while causing the enemy to believe that his principal objective was the castle, where Prince Edward was. But the surprise was not complete and the royalists rushed from the town to meet the enemy in the open field. Edward led his followers against the Londoners, who were gathered around the standard of Montfort, put them to flight, pursued them for several miles, and killed a great number of them. Montfort’s ruse, however, had been successful. He was not with his standard as his foes thought, but with the pick of his men he attacked Henry’s followers and took prisoner both the king and his brother. Before Edward returned from his chase the earl was in possession of the town. In its streets the prince strove to retrieve his fortunes, but in vain. Many of his men perished in the river, but others escaped, one band, consisting of Earl Warenne and others, taking refuge in Pevensey Castle. Edward himself took sanctuary and on the following day peace was made between the king and the earl.
LEWES, a town in Sussex county, Delaware, U.S.A., in the
S.E. part of the state, on Delaware Bay. Pop. (1910), 2158.
Lewes is served by the Philadelphia, Baltimore & Washington
(Pennsylvania System), and the Maryland, Delaware & Virginia
railways. Its harbour is formed by the Delaware Breakwater,
built by the national government and completed in 1869, and
214 m. above it another breakwater was completed in December
1901 by the government. The cove between them forms a
harbour of refuge of about 550 acres. At the mouth of Delaware
Bay, about 2 m. below Lewes, is the Henlopen Light, one of
the oldest lighthouses in America. The Delaware Bay pilots
make their headquarters at Lewes. Lewes has a large trade with
northern cities in fruits and vegetables, and is a subport of entry
of the Wilmington Customs District. The first settlement on
Delaware soil by Europeans was made near here in 1631 by
Dutch colonists, sent by a company organized in Holland in
the previous year by Samuel Blommaert, Killian van Rensselaer,
David Pieterszen de Vries and others. The settlers called the
place Zwaanendael, valley of swans. The settlement was soon
entirely destroyed by the Indians, and a second body of settlers
whom de Vries, who had been made director of the colony,
brought in 1632 remained for only two years. The fact of the
settlement is important; because of it the English did not unite
the Delaware country with Maryland, for the Maryland Charter
of 1632 restricted colonization to land within the prescribed
boundaries, uncultivated and either uninhabited or inhabited
only by Indians. In 1658 the Dutch established an Indian
trading post, and in 1659 erected a fort at Zwaanendael. After
the annexation of the Delaware counties to Pennsylvania in 1682,
its name was changed to Lewes, after the town of that name in
Sussex, England. It was pillaged by French pirates in 1698.
One of the last naval battles of the War of Independence was
fought in the bay near Lewes on the 8th of April 1782, when the
American privateer “Hyder Ally” (16), commanded by Captain
Joshua Barnes (1759–1818), defeated and captured the British
sloop “General Monk” (20), which had been an American
privateer, the “General Washington,” had been captured by
Admiral Arbuthnot’s squadron in 1780, and was now purchased
by the United States government and, as the “General
Washington,” was commanded by Captain Barnes in 1782–1784.
In March 1813 the town was bombarded by a British frigate.
See the “History of Lewes” in the Papers of the Historical Society of Delaware, No. xxxviii. (Wilmington, 1903); and J. T. Scharf, History of Delaware (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1888).
LEWIS, SIR GEORGE CORNEWALL, Bart. (1806–1863), English statesman and man of letters, was born in London on the 21st of April 1806. His father, Thomas F. Lewis, of Harpton Court, Radnorshire, after holding subordinate office in various administrations, became a poor-law commissioner, and was made a baronet in 1846. Young Lewis was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1828 he took a first-class in classics and a second-class in mathematics. He then entered the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar in 1831. In 1833 he undertook his first public work as one of the commissioners to inquire into the condition of the poor Irish residents in the United Kingdom.[1] In 1834 Lord Althorp included him in the commission to inquire into the state of church property and church affairs generally in Ireland. To this fact we owe his work on Local Disturbances in Ireland, and the Irish Church Question (London, 1836), in which he condemned the existing connexion between church and state, proposed a state provision for the Catholic clergy, and maintained the necessity of an efficient workhouse organization. During this period Lewis’s mind was much occupied with the study of language. Before leaving college he had published some observations on Whately’s doctrine of the predicables, and soon afterwards he assisted Thirlwall and Hare in starting the Philological Museum. Its successor, the Classical Museum, he also supported by occasional contributions. In 1835 he published an Essay on the Origin and Formation of the Romance Languages (re-edited in 1862), the first effective criticism in England of Raynouard’s theory of a uniform romance tongue, represented by the poetry of the troubadours. He also compiled a glossary of provincial words used in Herefordshire and the adjoining counties. But the most important work of this earlier period was one to which his logical and philological tastes contributed. The Remarks on the Use and Abuse of some Political Terms (London, 1832) may have been suggested by Bentham’s Book of Parliamentary Fallacies, but it shows all that power of clear sober original thinking which marks his larger and later political works. Moreover, he translated Boeckh’s Public Economy of Athens and Müller’s History of Greek Literature, and he assisted Tufnell in the translation of Müller’s Dorians. Some time afterwards he edited a text of the Fables of Babrius. While his friend Hayward conducted the Law Magazine, he wrote in it frequently on such subjects as secondary punishments and the penitentiary system. In 1836, at the request of Lord Glenelg, he accompanied John Austin to Malta, where they spent nearly two years reporting on the condition of the island and framing a new code of laws. One leading object of both commissioners was to associate the Maltese in the responsible government of the island. On his return to England Lewis succeeded his father as one of the principal poor-law commissioners. In 1841 appeared the Essay on the Government of Dependencies, a systematic statement and discussion of the various relations in which colonies may stand towards the mother country. In 1844 Lewis married Lady Maria Theresa Lister, sister of Lord Clarendon, and a lady of literary tastes. Much of their married life was spent in Kent House, Knightsbridge. They had no children. In 1847 Lewis resigned his office. He was then returned for the county of Hereford, and Lord John Russell appointed him secretary to the Board of Control, but a few months afterwards he became under-secretary to the Home Office. In this capacity he introduced two important bills, one for the abolition of turnpike trusts and the management of highways by a mixed county board, the other for the purpose of defining and regulating the law of parochial assessment. In 1850 he succeeded Hayter as financial secretary to the treasury. About this time, also, appeared his Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion. On the dissolution of parliament which followed the resignation of Lord John Russell’s ministry in 1852, Lewis was defeated for Herefordshire and then for Peterborough. Excluded from parliament he accepted the editorship of the Edinburgh Review, and remained editor until 1855. During this period he served on the Oxford commission, and on the commission to inquire into the government of London. But its chief fruits were the Treatise on the Methods of Observation and Reasoning in Politics, and the Enquiry into the Credibility of the Early Roman History,[2] in which he vigorously attacked
