Tom Paine, for six years a Lewes resident, played during what the historian Eric Hobsbawn has termed 'The Age of Revolution'.

Tom Paine was thirty one years of age when he first rode into Lewes, England, in 1768 to take up his post as excise officer. In the following six years his time as a member of the Headstrong Club (initiators of the Project) provided him with the opportunity to distil many of the radical ideas which, subsequently, were to earn him the title of 'one of the greatest of all Americans' (Thomas Edison) and 'the greatest exile who ever left England's shore' (Michael Foot).

In 1774 Paine sailed for America, where, within eighteen months he had written and published Common Sense, a brilliant tract which according to George Washington helped nerve the colonists to declare their independence. During the War of Independence, he soldiered with Washington and served for a brief period as the first U.S. Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

The war over, Paine returned to Europe shortly before the fall of the Bastille in 1789, to write his most famous work Rights of Man in defence of the French Revolution - a work, which, when published in Britain, forced Paine to flee England to avoid being charged with high treason.

Fêted in France, Paine became one of only two foreigners to sit on the National Assembly, where he was one of the Committee appointed to draft the first French Constitution. A moderate, vehemently opposed to the Jacobin extremists, his plea in mitigation of the death sentence passed on Louis XVI was to lead to his arrest and imprisonment. Eventually freed on the intercession of the U.S. Minister to France, Paine returned to the United States in 1801, where he died, virtually forgotten and close to poverty, in 1809.

Paine drew on Lewes's dissenting tradition when it came to formulating many of his own ideas. Indeed, there was no escaping it, for the town's radical past was present wherever he went, a robust tradition reaching back through time...

• # to a time when, five centuries previously, the townspeople razed much of Lewes castle at the death of their Norman overlord, protesting that they were now free men;
• to a time when, following the battle of Lewes in 1264, Simon de Montfort compelled Henry III to sign the Mise of Lewes which laid the foundation for parliamentary government in England;
• to a time when, during the Marian persecution of the mid sixteenth century, seventeen Protestant martyrs went to the stake in the name of their faith; and,
• to a time when, during the Civil War, Lewes declared for the Commonwealth and raised a troop to fight for the Parliamentary cause.

Of dissenting stock himself, the evidence of Lewes' contumacious past fired Paine's radicalism, for him to be presented with the Headstrong Club's Original Book of Obstinacy which included the tribute ...

'Immortal Paine while mighty reasoners jar,
We crown the General of the Headstrong War,
Thy logic vanquish'd error, and thy mind
No bounds but those of right and truth confined,
Thy soul of fire must sure ascend the sky,
Immortal Paine, thy fame can never die;
For men like thee their names must ever save
From the black edicts of the tyrant grave.'