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The Lewes Bonfire Festival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

David Wiles
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Abstract

The Lewes Bonfire Festival is an important piece of popular theatre, which has largely resisted attempts by higher authority to control and redefine it. Annually some 2,000 costumed participants, watched by up to 80,000 spectators, take over the streets of the usually staid county town of East Sussex, and effigies of contemporary politicians and of the Pope are burnt during six hours of carnivalesque rule. Here, David Wiles analyzes the history and organizational structure of the festival, and examines the ideology of Englishness upon which the event turns. David Wiles is Reader in Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London. His interest in popular theatre has principally been historical, and he has published books on the Robin Hood play and on the Elizabethan clown. Most recently, in Shakespeare's Almanac (D. S. Brewer, 1993) he has explored the structural logic of the festive calendar.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 46 , May 1996 , pp. 177 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes and References

1. Williams, RaymondProblems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 3–42Google Scholar; Marxism and literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 121–7.

2. Etherington, Jim analyzed the occupational categories of society members and committee members in 1974 in order to certify this point in The Sociology of a Recurrent Ceremonial Drama: Lewes Guy Fawkes Night 1800–1913(PhD thesis, Open University, 1987), p. 22–6Google Scholar.

3. For the history of 5 November, see Cressy, David ‘The Fifth of November Remembered’ in Myths of the English, ed. Porter, Roy (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 68–90.Google Scholar For further details see also Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989)Google Scholar.

4. See Etherington, Jim ‘The Lewes Bonfire Riots of 1847’, Sussex History, VI, No. 6 (1978), p. 2–16.Google Scholar For a general survey, see Etherington, Jim, Leiues Bonfire Night (Seaford: S. B. Publications, 1993).Google Scholar See also Munt, Bert, Bonfire (Lewes, 1958, typescript in Lewes Library)Google Scholar, and Beckett, Arthur, ‘A South Down Saturnalia’, in The Spirit of the Doivns (London: Methuen, 1949), p. 204–25Google Scholar.

5. See Etherington, Jim, ‘Lewes Bonfire Night Celebrations: an Incident in their Long History’, Sussex History, VI, No. 4 (1977), p. 8–21Google Scholar.

6. I have excluded from consideration the sixth Lewes bonfire society, the Nevill Juvenile Bonfire Society, since it joins the processions of 5 November as a visitor.

7. See Chapman, Brigid, Night of the Fires: Bonfire in Sussex from the Plot to the Present Day (Seaford: S. B. Publications, 1994)Google Scholar.

8. Written by W. Ward-Higgs, and published by Herman Darewski Publishing Co., London, 1907.

9. Annual coverage is provided by the Sussex Express. Kerridge, Roy published a vivid account of the 1983 festival in ‘Burning the Pope’, The Spectator, 12 11 1983Google Scholar.

10. The speech is reported, though not cited verbatim, in Sussex Express, 6 November 1901. On the Bishop, W. T. Gearing, see Etherington, Lewes Bonfire Night, p. 49–50.

11. The editor was being pilloried for his cult of personality, photographing faces rather than costumes when covering the fancy dress competition which precedes the processions.

12. I am grateful to Pete Martin and the Cliffe Bonfire Society for making available to me the text of the Archbishop, Mr. Tim Fellows.

13. Sussex Express, 9 November 1984.

14. The speeches of 1902 are reprinted in the Sussex Express. I am grateful to Pete Martin for making available to me the text of the 1984 speech.

15. Evening Argus, 6 November 1990.

16. Borough Bonfire Society programme, 1984.

17. See Bakhtin, M., Rabelais and his World, trans. Iswolsky, H. (Bloomingtom: Indiana University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986)Google Scholar.

18. Unattributed newspaper cutting, Lewes Library.

19. Cf. Etherington, Lewes Bonfire Night, p. 56, 61.

20. [Lower, M. A.], Observations on the Doings in Lewes on the Evening of 5th November (Lewes, 1846), p. 9–10Google Scholar.

21. For information and assistance, without which I could not have prepared this article, I am grateful to Keith Austin, Jim Etherington, and Pete Martin of the Cliffe Bonfire Society; to David Winter of the Borough Bonfire Society; to John Richards of the Commercial Square Bonfire Society; to J. Greenaway of Lewes Library; and to Catherine Osborne, formerly of Royal Holloway College. I am particularly grateful to Jim Etherington for reading a draft. Interpretations are of course my own.