Lewis

Llywelyn anglicised, a princely name carried into common use across the Marches and the south.

Origin: Powys, Wales
Famous bearer: Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), playwright, founding figure of Plaid Cymru
Register: Welsh family

Territory of Lewis

CoreHistoric reach

The seat of Lewis

Seat vacant

Chief

No one leads the Lewis community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.

Current mission

No shared goal set yet. Once Lewis has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.

The Lewis clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.

Help rebuild the Lewis clan →

What does the Lewis name mean?

From the Welsh Llywelyn, Anglicised as Lewis from the late medieval period. Llywelyn was the great princely name of the House of Aberffraw, Llywelyn the Great (d.1240) and Llywelyn the Last (d.1282), and the form Lewis carried its prestige into a Tudor administrative orthography that lacked any glyph for the Welsh 'll' and that, after the Acts of Union of 1536, was actively compressing Welsh names into English forms in record-keeping and law. The English Lewis (from Frankish Hludwig, Louis) reinforced the surname from the Marcher side.

The history of Lewis

Lewis is one of the most common Welsh surnames in mid- and south-east Wales, Powys, Monmouthshire and Glamorgan in particular. The surname is overwhelmingly from the Welsh Llywelyn line; only a small minority of bearers descend from the Frankish-route Lewis brought to England by the Normans.

Sir George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863) was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Palmerston; Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), the Liverpool-Welsh playwright, was one of the founders of Plaid Cymru and the author of Tynged yr Iaith ('The Fate of the Language'), the 1962 radio lecture that triggered the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg and the modern Welsh-language movement.

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), the Belfast-born author of the Narnia books, was descended on his father's side from a Welsh Lewis line, the Lewises of Carmarthenshire, that had emigrated to Cork in the 18th century.

Champions of the Lewis name

The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.

John Lewis
The Shepton Mallet draper's apprentice who opened a single Oxford Street shop in 1864 and whose son turned the firm into the John Lewis Partnership, owned in trust by every person who works in it.

Step Into History

Walk the streets and seats the Lewis name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.

Step Into History · New

Walk Raglan Castle in 1645Enter →

The grandest castle-palace in Wales at its height — the moated Yellow Tower, fountain courts and long gallery, on the eve of the siege.

Step Into History · New

Walk Cardiff Docks in 1913Enter →

The greatest coal port on earth at its peak — the hoists and colliers, the Coal Exchange and the streets of Tiger Bay.

Notable bearers of the Lewis name

Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), playwright, founding figure of Plaid Cymru
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), author (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters)
Sir George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863), Chancellor of the Exchequer

Stories of Lewis

C. S. Lewis at Whipsnade
1931
On the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-eighth of September 1931, on the sidecar of his brother Warnie's BSA motorcycle on the road from Headington Quarry in Oxford to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire (about a forty-mile run via Aylesbury), C. S. Lewis, thirty-two years old, the Belfast-born Magdalen College Oxford English Literature fellow, completed the religious conversion that had begun on the summer night of the nineteenth of September. By his own account in Surprised by Joy (1955), the late-summer conversation he had had on Addison's Walk by the Cherwell with his fellow Magdalen fellow J. R. R. Tolkien (a devout Catholic) and Hugo Dyson (a Anglican literature lecturer) had been the philosophical-and-literary-mythological turning-point. The conversation, on a mid-September night by Magdalen Bridge between eight in the evening and three in the morning, had argued the question of whether the Christian story was, in its narrative form, the truth of which all the pagan-mythological dying-and-rising god-stories Lewis had been studying as a classicist were partial-shadowy reflections. By Whipsnade on the morning of the twenty-eighth, sitting in the sidecar in his leather-helmet, Lewis came finally to the internal-acceptance of the Christian story. The conversion of C. S. Lewis is, by every careful judgment of the twentieth-century English-language Christian apologetic tradition, the foundational personal-conversion of the Lewis Christianity that produced The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), Mere Christianity (1952), and Surprised by Joy (1955).
Read the story →

Frequently asked

What does the surname Lewis mean?

Where does the Lewis family come from?

The Lewis family is rooted in Powys and Gwent, in Wales. Within that, the name was particularly concentrated in Powys and Sir Fynwy. The atlas page for the name records the historical territory it has held over the centuries.

Where did the Lewis family historically hold territory?

At its greatest historical extent, the Lewis name has been concentrated in Maelor, Dyffryn Clwyd, Tegeingl, Ceredigion, Sir Gâr and Sir Benfro. The atlas page distinguishes the core territory of the name from this wider historical reach with hatched silhouettes on the map.

Is Lewis a Wales surname?

Yes, Lewis is a Wales surname. Its editorial home in this atlas is Wales, where the historical territory and family record of the name are concentrated.

How old is the Lewis surname?

Lewis is one of the most common Welsh surnames in mid- and south-east Wales, Powys, Monmouthshire and Glamorgan in particular. European hereditary surnames crystallised broadly between the 12th and 14th centuries, and the Lewis name took its modern form within that long settlement.

What is the Lewis family known for?

Llywelyn anglicised, a princely name carried into common use across the Marches and the south. Lewis is one of the most common Welsh surnames in mid- and south-east Wales, Powys, Monmouthshire and Glamorgan in particular.

Who is the most famous Lewis?

The best-known bearer of the Lewis name is Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), playwright, founding figure of Plaid Cymru. Other prominent figures of the family include C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), author (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters) and Sir George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863), Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Who are some famous Lewises?

Notable bearers of the Lewis name include Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), playwright, founding figure of Plaid Cymru, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), author (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters) and Sir George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863), Chancellor of the Exchequer. Each is profiled on the family page, with cross-links to the geography, stories, and historical events tied to their life.

What stories are told about the Lewis family?

The Lewis family is associated with C. S. Lewis at Whipsnade. Each story has its own page on this site with the full account, the date, the location, and the other families involved.

What is the story of C. S. Lewis at Whipsnade?

On the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-eighth of September 1931, on the sidecar of his brother Warnie's BSA motorcycle on the road from Headington Quarry in Oxford to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire (about a forty-mile run via Aylesbury), C. S. The event is dated to 1931.

Where is the Lewis surname found today?

Wales is the primary historical home of the Lewis surname. In the modern era, the name is also borne across the wider diaspora, particularly in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where families carry the line of descent from the same Wales origin recorded on this page.

What does the Clan Rising page for the Lewis family cover?

The Clan Rising page for the Lewis family covers the meaning of the surname, the historical geography of the name, famous bearers of the name, traditional stories and the seat of the head of the family. Each section is linked to the underlying atlas of Wales so the name can be read in the geography that shaped it.

Who is the head of the Lewis family today?

The seat for the head of the Lewis family is currently vacant on this register. Clan Rising is rebuilding the chief and family structure for the modern era, and the family page allows readers to claim the seat or pledge to the name.