Lewes is the county town of East Sussex, England and the police and judicial center for all of Sussex; it is located 44 miles south of London. Known to the Anglo-Saxons as Laewe (meaning "barrow" or "hill", from Celtic llechwedd), Lewes is located along the River Ouse, and a Brythonic hillfort was built at Mount Caburn during the Iron Age. The Romans built an aristocratic villa at the food of Mount Caburn, and the Romans may have built a legionary fortress at the site and called the surrounding village Mutuantonis. The Anglo-Saxons arrived in the 6th century AD, and Laewe became one of the most important settlements of the Kingdom of Sussex. By the 9th century, Laewe had been annexed to Wessex, and King Alfred the Great fortified Laewe against the Vikings as a burh. Laewe became a thriving boom town in the late Anglo-Saxon period, and, following the Norman conquest of England, William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey built Lewes Castle in 1081 to maintain public order. During the Second Barons' War, the Battle of Lewes was fought in 1264, and King Henry III of England was ambushed and decisively defeated. The town lost its prestige on the extinction of the De Warenne family in 1347 and Richard Fitzalan, 4th Earl of Arundel's relocation to Arundel, and French raids on Sussex during the Hundred Years' War badly disrupted trade. In 1538, Lewes Priory was demolished during the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII. Henry's daughter, Queen Mary I of England, reversed the English Reformation and instead persecuted Protestants, leading to the execution of seventeen Protestants from the Weald in Lewes; the seventeen Protestant martyrs are commemorated in the annual Lewes Bonfire on 5 November. Lewes was strongly Puritan at the time of the English Civil War, and it was an important Parliamentarian stronghold during the war and was the site of the Battle of Muster Green in December 1642. The town recovered relatively quickly after the Civil War and continued to be one of the principal market towns of Sussex, as well as an important port and a center of the textiles, iron, brewing, and ship-building industries during the Industrial Revolution. In 1836, Lewes experienced Britain's deadliest recorded avalanche when 8 people were buried and killed by an avalanche from Cliffe Hill. In 1846, Lewes became a railway junction, and the development of Newhaven ended Lewes' status as a major port. During the Crimean War, 300 Finnish prisoners of war were interned in Lewes. By 2011, Lewes had a population of 17,297 people, and it was a Conservative Party stronghold for almost its entire history, with the Liberal Democrats briefly representing the constituency from 1997 to 2015, before it swung back to the Tories.
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