Teaching a recent class on early modern tragedy, I showed my students a 17th century broadside depicting the execution of Guy Fawkes. I decided they could handle it — term had only just started and the early autumn sun was shining. Since then, Liz Truss’s government has fallen and Britain is plunged ever-deeper into crisis. The clocks have gone back and the rain has arrived; my students have reached the halfway haven of Reading Week. 

We touched on the grim details of Fawkes’s punishment. Alongside his surviving co-conspirators (Robert Catesby, the ringleader, died in a Staffordshire shoot-out) Fawkes was dragged to the scaffold to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Luckily for him, the force of the drop seems to have ended his life before he could suffer mutilation, though this didn’t stop the authorities having their way with his body. In the broadside an executioner — sleeves rolled up — slices open Fawkes’s decapitated torso and reaches in to pull out his entrails. Spectators in wide-brimmed hats press eagerly forward. 

We talked about the theatricality of this gruesome spectacle, the striking resemblance of the scaffold to the thrust stage of a Shakespearean playhouse. We discussed Guy Fawkes’s afterlife, too, his starring role in the rituals of 5 November and Bonfire Night. One of my students has just arrived in England and listened with polite bemusement. What were our bonfires and fireworks commemorating, she asked — Guy Fawkes or his execution? The Protestant government or the Catholic rebellion? The fire that didn’t spread, or the quenching of conspiracy? 

A bit of both, we agreed. The crowd at Fawkes’s execution undoubtedly fancied a spot of cruelty, the punishment of the abject. Many of them were also terrified of Fawkes: of what would have happened if Parliament had exploded, killing the King and his counsellors; of the sectarian strife that had engulfed England before the fragile Elizabethan settlement; of a Catholic rule they associated with tyranny. Over the 17th century the English imagination starts to associate Protestantism with liberty of a political as well as religious kind.

This endlessly commemorated event was a non-event

England is no longer an avowedly Protestant country (though a reservoir of bigoted anti-Catholic tropes, their origins more anciently sectarian than rationally secular, is still brimming). Bonfire Night remains a fixture of our calendar, despite the regular — and, ironically, venerable — tradition of declaring its imminent demise at the hands of Halloween. If the event retains a political meaning, it’s about free expression: Liz Truss’s effigy will be burnt this year as we exercise our right to mock and ridicule our (former) rulers. Yet as that secularised freedom uncouples from association with Protestantism, perhaps it recruits Guy Fawkes himself. In Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta, Fawkes isn’t an emblem of an authoritarian Christian denomination; he’s a soldier of anarchist freedom, inspiration for the eponymous hero’s mask.

There’s a deeper irony here. This endlessly commemorated event (in the King’s own words, this “never enough wondered at and abhorred POWDERTREASON”) was a non-event: a bomb that didn’t go off, a fire that never started. On the first anniversary of the Plot, Lancelot Andrewes preached a sermon on God’s works (Psalm 118: “this is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes”) which explores a similar paradox: this day a year past, he says, “was meant to be the day of all our deaths … there was a thing doing on it, [which] if it had been done, we would all have been undone”. We are supposed to commemorate something not happening. But lighting fires is more exciting than putting them out, and the attraction of today’s Bonfire Night is inseparable from the eternal attraction of fire.

Nowhere is Bonfire Night celebrated more vigorously than East Sussex, the tricorn-shaped coastal county south of Kent. Once it was part of the Saxon kingdom of Sussex, which lived until its division into East and West in 1974. Many in England have heard of the celebrations in Lewes, East Sussex’s county town. Most of the time it’s a leafy, quiet place on the edge of the South Downs. On 5 November its population quadruples as a carnival takes over. Marchers in weird and wonderful costumes process through the streets carrying burning crosses. Effigies of the powerful, including Paul V (Pope at the time of the Plot), are burnt. There’s a general atmosphere of anarchic revelry. Brighton in the far southwest of the county is a world away, to say nothing of London.

Lewes gets most of the attention, but the culture of Bonfire has thrived across East Sussex. Throughout the autumn, before and after the Fifth, villages and towns stage their own processions, carnivals and bonfires. Each event is organised by its own Bonfire Society, and each Society invites the others. Lewes is unusual for its multiple Societies (more than five), but by no means dwarfs the rest: Battle, Hastings and Mayfield among others hold elaborate and spectacular carnivals. Friendly but entrenched rivalries smoulder on, and styles of celebration differ across the county: towards Lewes there’s a heavy emphasis on costume. Further east, around Battle, more importance is placed on fire, especially flaming torches. Elaborate, impenetrable hierarchies operate, with plenty of tongue-in-cheek: a Society in procession is led by a General, with other high-ranking positions reflected in dress. Entry-level members wear Guernsey jumpers with hooped stripes; Societies have their own colours. 

Many East Sussex settlements saw Protestant martyrs burnt at the stake

When the procession’s over and the effigies have sagged into ashes, marchers and bystanders eat and drink and make merry. The bigger villages might have fairground rides. It’s a good excuse to have some fun as a community, but for many participants it’s more than that. The iconography is shot through with playfulness, but the ritual is deeply serious. Under Mary I’s government, fifty years before the Plot, many East Sussex settlements saw Protestant martyrs burnt at the stake. Now, every autumn, they are commemorated. The Societies insist that the celebrations are no longer motivated by anti-Catholicism; after all, Sussex has its Catholic martyrs too. Yet as anti-Catholicism recedes — leaving its symbols behind — political convictions endure. With their cartoonish inflated heads, the absurdly big effigies show a Hogarthian satirical spirit at work. To burn them expresses a right to raucous, uncompromising dissent. So does marching: since the 1840s the road in rural England has become ever-more regulated and policed. The rituals of Bonfire stop the traffic, letting marchers proceed through the high street, flaming torches in hand.

Much of East Sussex sits between the South Downs and the rolling, hop-growing country of Kent. Known as the Weald, this is a landscape of steep little hills and streams, ancient woodland, villages of red-brick and weatherboarded houses strung out along ridgetops. In the 19th century it was a poor place, difficult to farm, remote even after the arrival of the railways to Brighton and Hastings. An ancient iron industry had died out. In such conditions the non-conforming denominations appealed, and the 19th century Weald was full of dissenting congregations. Today, in a county that still has only ten miles of dual carriageway, it’s a bonfire heartland. 

Even in 19th century Sussex, revelry and rebellion seem to have trumped sectarian considerations. Plenty of offence was taken. In 1846, one “Old Inhabitant” of Lewes denounced the “disgusting parade of disguises, bludgeons and riot”, the “fireballs, with rockets”. Anyone wanting to commemorate the anniversary of the Plot should consider “confining their rejoicings to their own premises”. Of course, the Old Inhabitant was missing the point. If the people are to keep their freedom, they have to exercise it occasionally in public. Too much deference to respectability, and the freedom vanishes.

Originally, revellers blackened their faces with soot to disguise themselves

In the second half of the 20th century the bonfire traditions slowly declined; by the 1980s, in some parts, they seemed to be dying out. (Ian Paisley visited Lewes in 1981, trying to forge connections with Northern Ireland’s own Protestant bonfire traditions; the following year his effigy was burnt.) But in the 1990s they experienced a strange, joyous rebirth. Historians fixate on the nineties as the point when “Englishness” began to emerge in discussions of political nationhood. More certain, though, is a great revival towards the end of the century in England that was primarily cultural: an excavation of buried English customs and traditions, often propelled by a green consciousness. Thanks to this revival, and the tireless dedication of their members, the Societies are mostly in good health. 

But how long will they endure? Sussex is unrecognisable from the place it was when the railway arrived. Today it’s an affluent county, and the Weald has its fair share of gastropubs and coffee shops. Lots of the wealth came from London, brought closer by the spread of the railway and the arrival of the car. Commuters have lived harmoniously in parts of East Sussex for decades. The loosening of community ties in England means that those moving out from London today might increasingly feel no affiliation or responsibility to the places where they spend their evenings and weekends. Newick’s Society closed down recently, and Fletching’s is in trouble. As well as apathy from new arrivals they face hostility: people complain about safety, about the fireworks scaring their dogs, about the smell and the environmental impact of bonfire smoke.

They complain, too, about the offensive nature of some costumes and effigies. Originally, revellers blackened their faces with soot to disguise themselves. But in 1952 a visitor to Newick observed “Zulu chiefs” and “a crowd of cannibals with a missionary all ready for the pot”. Face-blackening has ended, but not totally, and the line has been crossed in other ways: in 2003 there was a notorious burning of a “gypsy caravan” effigy in Firle. Whatever the intention, images like these are simply too redolent of alienating prejudice to be defensible. It would be wrong, similarly, to dismiss concerns about environmental impact and safety as only contemporary versions of Lewes’s outraged “Old Inhabitant”. Yet it’s also wrong to insist that rural communities in England should never press back peacefully against respectability, even as respectability smothers them with its boring, homogenous culture. It’s been said that the Enlightenment, with the deracinated rationality it exalts, is like a cold light without fire. The Bonfire Societies, by contrast, offer us fire in the darkness.